


Four Minute Warning

by taormina



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Attempt at Humor, First Dates, Fluff and Angst, Hurt Q, M/M, Slow Burn, Technology, Undercover Missions, matchmaker Moneypenny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-26
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-03 12:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5290775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taormina/pseuds/taormina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'With only four minutes left on the clock, Q had a choice: he could either die saving the world, never having kissed Bond — or kiss him regardless of the consequences.'</p><p>Q's plans to ask Bond out on a date fail miserably when he's told to go undercover for the first time in his career.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Hard Time With Love

‘Q, I need you to give me the details of Cabot’s location, _now_.’

‘Give me a second, 007, I’m working on it.’

‘I need you to do so faster.’

‘There’s no need for impatience.’

A groan. ‘ _Q._ ’

The stereotypical image of a computer genius, Q was typing at great speed. He moved his mouse faster than he could keep track of on his stickered laptop. A group of fellow Q-Branchers was busy doing the same thing on their high-performance tablets, but Q was already one step ahead when he pulled up CCTV footage of London. It appeared like a patchwork quilt on the six screens on the wall before him.

A red dot on a digital map signalled Bond’s location. It blinked in and out of existence slowly, moving in perfect accordance with Bond’s whereabouts.

Bond walked into the periphery of one of the cameras, and so did his prey.

‘ _Ah_ , there he is,’ Q said, all innocently, when he spotted the man Bond was in pursuit of. ‘He’s headed for Marble Arch. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

Bond heaved an exaggerated sigh of vexation and made a dramatic 180° turn in the middle of a crowded street. He was running fast, pushing civilians with stuffed shopping bags out of the way. A woman was shoved into a crowd of tourists, and her newly purchased clothes ended up in a pitiful mess on the floor. People shouted after the spy, telling him to stop — but Bond had already been swept away by the thrill of the chase.

His long coat was flapping uselessly behind him. The weather was unsuitably warm and sunny for a chase. His gun felt heavy against his body.

He hoped he didn’t have to use it.

A cab almost ran Bond over as he crossed the street, but he leaped out of the way just in time and ran off with a chorus of shouts and displeased car honks as his companion.

Sometimes he hated London.

Q lazily sipped his cup of Earl Grey as he watched the scene unfold on his screens. It was morning, nine o’clock on a Saturday, and it would have been his day off if not for this bloody Cabot showing his face.

He always hated it so when he had to survey chases. There wasn’t a point, really; Bond always managed to find the guy with or without his help. (But he did _love_ seeing Bond run around like that, all sweaty and a little bit frustrated.)

Bond, in his earpiece: ‘Thanks for warning me about that cab, by the way, Q.’

‘I’m so sorry, 007, I forgot that there is a precedent for incoming cabs in London,’ Q said, heart beating fast for reasons unrelated to the excitement of the chase. ‘Should I warn you about all the double-decker buses as well, or will you be all right on your own?’

They both had Cabot in his sights now: tall, strong, not likely to have any other associates. The textbook version of a killer.  

It was almost too easy, and that made it dangerous. Another street crossed. The crowd on the streets was getting larger now, and a group of tourists watched how Bond took a shortcut and ran across the grass, sending startled pidgins flying as he went. An old man tutted at a ‘Don’t walk on the grass’ sign.

Cabot climbed over a gate and Bond mimicked it; he felt like he was getting closer and closer — and yet the image of Cabot kept receding in front of him — how Cabot managed to be faster than him he did not know . . .

‘Q, we’re _losing_ him.’

A _ping_ signalled the arrival of an IM on Q’s laptop. Q looked at it, and so didn’t notice that one of his six screens turned itself on and off like a manually restarted computer.

_Have you asked James out yet x – Eve_

For a moment distracted, Q neglected the ongoing chase and replied, very rapidly:

_Not a good time – Q_

‘Q, where — the — car?’ Bond’s voice sounded for a moment like a car radio in a tunnel. This was odd; their mikes and earpieces usually worked.

‘Repeat that please, 007?’

‘Very funny, Q. Where’s Donald with the bloody car?’

Q ignored the panting in his ear and focussed very badly on multitasking; he saw Donald’s car head to Bond’s location and brake — four men got out, more than enough to catch Cabot, or it should be if he was still unarmed — Moneypenny sent him another text —

_Oh? – Eve_

‘They’re on your way now, 007. You’re not running out of steam, are you?’ he said sarcastically, then replied to Moneypenny’s text:

_I’m kind of in the middle of something – Q_

‘I’d like to see _you_ do this, Q,’ Bond groaned in Q’s ear before almost running into a group of Dutch tourists.

(Q wished the rest of Q-Branch didn’t insist on using these bloody earpieces; hearing Bond huff and puff in his ear like that almost gave him a bloody semi. Once, it actually _did_ , and he had to pretend he got a call from M in the middle of a chase that he was surveilling so he could pop into the loo. His colleagues weren’t best pleased with that, but what can you do?)

‘I think you’ll find I’m actually in perfect physical condition,’ Q pointed out. This was a lie.

Another _ping_ , another distraction.

 _You’re not snogging him already, are you? – Eve_ (Bless her.)

‘Helping Bond not make a fool of himself, actually,’ Q mistakenly said to Bond instead of typing it on his keyboard, and he accidentally poured tea over his case files in sheer embarrassment. By the time he had gotten up to grab a dirty towel from the other end of his desk and clean the mess, Cabot had conveniently tripped over a loose tile.

Q returned his attention to the screens just in time to see Bond leap on Cabot like a cat. He held him in place on the ground, Cabot’s face pressed painfully against the pavement, and shooed away the crowd of curious and excited onlookers with his left hand. 

‘What. Happened. To. Kaye?’ Bond hissed when most of the crowd had thinned out. An excited young man stayed behind to film the spectacle on his smartphone, but Bond ordered him away with just a single look.

‘I ain’t tellin’,’ Cabot spat, and Bond pressed his fingers against a very sensitive spot on the killer’s body. He could hear Q go ‘ow’ in his ear.

Bond went on, less kindly, ‘I’m not asking you again, Cabot. What happened to Kaye?’

Cabot murmured something incomprehensible. He had gone red in the face.

‘Speak. _Clearer_ ,’ Bond growled.

‘H-he knew too much.’

‘About what?’ Q wondered out loud. When he pressed his Grumpy Cat cup to his lips, the tea – or what was left of it – had gone cold.

‘About _what_?’ Bond growled, applying yet more pressure with his fingertips.

‘Project Alt-Delete,’ Cabot cried out against the pavement, ‘it’s some secret Clementine thing. I ain’t know nothin’ about it, I swear. We was just hired to take out the folks who knew too much about it.’

‘You should ask him who hired him,’ Q suggested helpfully. He absently flicked the switch on his electric water boiler.

Bond rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, I know that, Q.’ Then to Cabot, ‘Who hired you?’

‘They never said.’

‘ _Brilliant_.’ Believing it, Bond let go of him and got up from the ground just as Donald and his men showed up to arrest Cabot. The man didn’t even struggle when he was shoved into a car.

Bond dusted the dirt off his coat and deliberately touched his ear. ‘Sorry, Q, what did you say about me making a fool of myself? Look up Project Alt-Delete for me, will you?’ he ordered, and he took out his earpiece and walked coolly back towards Marble Arch.

*

‘Two missed calls, Moneypenny. That's excessive even for you. You do realize you don't have to keep checking up on me? I _have_ successfully asked people out before. Twice, admittedly,’ he added quickly, ‘and one of them was a complete disaster, but I’m not a _complete_ train wreck when it comes to dating.’

‘I will stop when you and Bond finally have dinner together. Are you taking him to that nice vegan restaurant in Soho?’

‘I am. I will.’ He sighed into the receiver. ‘I mean, I'm intending to.’

‘Will there be kissing?’

‘If that's what 007 wants. If that's what we both — want.’

Moneypenny gasped. ‘How _romantic_.’

‘You know, Moneypenny, I sometimes wonder whether the reason you're so invested in my love life is because you haven't got one of your own. Have you tried internet dating? It’s very popular these days, I’m sure you’d find someone willing in no-time.’

‘I _have_ a love life, thank you.’

‘Is he also MI6 or are you still pretending that you have a regular desk job? That worked out oh so well in the past.’ A pause, then, hurriedly, ‘He's here. We'll talk later.’

It all started a couple of weeks ago, at the main offices of Clementine Tech. A sort of reply to the world’s more expensive electronics brands, Clementine Tech was funded in the ideal that one could sell high-quality computers, laptops and smartphones to regular consumers for less. Through sheer luck – and thanks to an unknown benefactor –, the company soon made a name for themselves. Within ten years, their products were everywhere, and in everything. Even the SD cards in Q-Branch’s smartphones were Clementine’s, and why should they not be? They were cheap and reliable, and one had yet to turn up damaged.

Clementine Tech was deemed by all to be a trustworthy company until their CEO died a suspicious death a fortnight ago. Strangely both the police and the press covered it up entirely, and within a day a brand new CEO was appointed whom not a single person had ever heard of. Her CV, which one could easily Google, was weirdly impeccable.

Yet no-one bat an eyelid. If there were suspicious goings-on, no-one seemed to want to know about it.

Then the CEO of their German sister company died, and things got weird. A journalist even discovered that Clementine’s start-up was founded by an organisation with criminal ties back in the 90s, and she too died. Suicide, the local police said, but some knew better; an assassin named Cabot was behind all three murders, or so the evidence would suggest. And the really weird thing? Cabot only usually went in for high-class kills. Politicians, spies, that sort of thing. Why would he bother with the heads of a relatively normal electronics company?

Strange things were happening over at Clementine Tech, and with their products currently owned by over two million households in Britain alone, something larger might be at play.

Q looked up ‘Project Alt-Delete’ in every database he could access and more, but found nothing. It was the only lead they had, and it was a dead end. Cabot might have been lying to get Bond off his back. (Literally.)

But Q’s troubles had to wait, for he was about to do something very brave.

He was going to ask James Bond out. For real, this time.

In preparation, Q had drunk far too many cups of ‘calming’ tea, which in effect only made him feel more anxious because the tea wasn’t working. He was wearing his best sweater; something snug and tight that showed off the muscles he didn’t have but looked amazing on him regardless. His hair, what he felt was his best asset, looked combed.

Finally, Moneypenny had, of course, phoned him to see how he was getting on. He had even cleaned his lab at the last minute.

Then the door of his lab opened, and Q quickly ended his conversation with Moneypenny and put away his phone.

This was the moment he’d been waiting for.

This wasn’t his first time trying to ask Bond out. The first attempt came in the shape of a carefully worded e-mail that romantically but efficiently asked Bond whether he was available for drinks at _that_ vegan restaurant in Soho. Q accidentally sent it to 009, who replied a tad too enthusiastically and had to be told a very big fib.

The second time Q tried asking Bond out, they were waiting for M in his office. It almost slipped out, just six words — but then M walked in and ruined the moment. The third attempt was classified information.

The fourth attempt was today.

He’d just say it. _Ask_ him. It’d be easy.

‘Good morning, 007,’ Q said, trying hard to disguise the nervousness in his voice, ‘I take it you’re here to pick up the tech I promised you?’ (Yesterday, Q lied that he had made an exploding pen to get Bond down here. Exploding pens excited the spy very much indeed.)

Q couldn’t remember when he started fancying Bond. It wasn’t a case of love at first sight, but Q did _feel_ something when they first met. A spark, perhaps. A mutual desire to test each other’s limits. There was a challenge in getting Bond to like him professionally, and he was more than willing to play the game. Then they started spending more time together, never informally but always on missions, and like a background download Q’s feelings for Bond grew and grew without him knowing until it suddenly hit him.

Q’s heart wasn’t beating so fast because of the thrill of their shared missions, but because of Bond being there with him. He didn’t go into work early because he wanted to get things done, but because catching a rare glimpse of Bond in the morning always made his day.

That’s how his feelings for Bond had crept up on him, and that’s why, on this warm morning, he was going to ask him out.

‘Actually, no,’ Bond said, and Q stopped in the middle of going to the shelf where he kept the pen. ‘I’m here to tell you that you’re going undercover at Clementine Tech.’

Q opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again when nothing came out. ‘I’m - _what_?’ he finally managed to croak out.

‘You’re going undercover at Clementine Tech.’

‘Yes, I heard you,’ Q said. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Why me?’ he asked in a voice he did not recognise. This wasn’t happening, surely?

Bond put his hands inside the pockets of his coat. When Q wasn’t looking, he gave him a quick once-over. He liked the new sweater he was wearing. It showed off his muscles a little.

‘Because you’re good at your job,’ was Bond’s rehearsed answer, ‘and because you know this field better than anyone.’

Q felt his previous elation of being on the verge of asking Bond out melting like snow. He’d never been undercover before. That wasn’t what he was at MI6 for. He’d been hired to invent things, cause havoc with his laptop. He could do so sitting behind his desk, drinking a cup of tea; that was the whole _point_ of his being there. His going undercover would rather beat the purpose.

A _ping_ sounded. It was no doubt a text from Moneypenny.

‘Someone will talk you through it this afternoon,’ Bond went on undisturbed. ‘You’re meant to find out more about this Project Alt-Delete that Cabot talked about. M thinks that you may be able to hack into their computers, see anyone knows something.’

‘Has it escaped M’s attention that I can hack into a computer without actually having to touch it?’ Q said. He didn’t like how angry he sounded. This wasn’t how he had imagined his morning to go at all.

‘The best hackers in the world have tried getting into Clementine’s system, and _they_ couldn’t do it.’

‘Then they clearly weren’t as good as I am.’

‘Please, Q,’ Bond said tiredly. ‘Just do as M says.’

Q sighed. He knew it was no use arguing with whatever M was asking of him.

‘So Cabot hasn’t given more information? He has to know more, surely.’ Q said, his voice embarrassingly wobbly. He was starting to feel light-headed at the prospect of going undercover at a company where at least two people had been killed.

‘The only thing he said this morning was that Project Alt-Delete cannot be stopped, whatever it is. And that it’s everywhere,’ Bond added as an afterthought.

‘That’s reassuring.’

‘I’m sorry, Q,’ Bond said, meaning it.

‘No, no, it’s all right,’ Q said distractedly, dropping his arms to his sides as if he didn’t know what to do with them. ‘There’s a first time for everything, as they say.’

Q’s smile did nothing to convince Bond that the Quartermaster was ready for the job.

‘So what did you have to show me?’ Bond asked with a gesture at the shelf Q had been headed towards, keen to change the subject. ‘You sounded very excited over the phone. Speaking of, the smartphone you have me has been acting very strangely these past few days. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Q lied. He didn’t want to do this now. He couldn’t ask Bond out with his head suddenly full of a million different worries. ‘It’s not quite finished yet. Next week, I suspect,’ Q said, returning to his laptop so he didn’t have to watch Bond go.

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry, 007. And _my_ phone’s working fine,’ Q added without looking at Bond. He pretended to be typing something on his laptop. ‘It’s probably just some electrical interference.’

‘I see, thank you, Q.’

Q said nothing when Bond left.

*

He’d been wrong to agree that Q was the right person for the job.

Q was everything _but_.

He’d never been on an undercover mission before. He hardly ever left his lab, even when the going got tough and Bond was out there risking his life in dangerous situations.

He probably didn’t even know how to fire a bloody gun.

And Bond didn’t mind all that. He liked Q as he was, slaving away at his laptop or hacking into computer systems like it was child’s play. Hearing his beautiful voice in his ear, commanding Bond to go left or right. He would love Q to give him commands like that for real, without earpieces and hidden microphones. It’s just — what if something ever _did_ happen? What if Q was in serious danger and he had no idea how to protect himself? He couldn’t stop a bullet with his laptop, try as he might.

Bond attempted to teach Q self-defence once, just because. (Although admittedly the prospect of seeing Q’s cute arse in tight sports trousers _did_ play a big part in the designing of this plan.)

He pretended it was all part of this big scheme that intended to train and assess each member of staff, and he had even gone through the trouble of renting one of the underground sports halls where 00 agents sometimes played sports to blow off steam. They’d do some hand-to-hand combat and whatever else Bond came up with on the spot, like gentle wrestling or something.

Rather predictably, Q didn’t fall for the scheme and said he would be all right on his own. He didn’t need self-defence classes, he said. He was just a guy with a computer; what on Earth would he need protecting from? And if he _did_ get into trouble, he said, he’d just hit the guy with a cricket bat.

How _wrong_ he was.

‘James! _James_! Get back here, you can’t just —’

‘Like hell I can,’ Bond told a very infuriated Moneypenny at her desk, and he blundered into M’s office without so much knocking on the door. He intentionally slammed the door shut before Moneypenny could rightly tell him off for being a rude, inconsiderate arse. A small frame comically fell off the wall and landed on the floor undamaged.

Bond didn’t wait for M to tell him to piss off. ‘Whose great idea _was_ it to put Q on this mission?’ He sounded angry, but he hadn’t raised his voice. He had that much dignity left. ‘ _Yours_? Was it some desk agent who has no idea how these things work? Was it Q himself? He’s out of his depth here and you _know_ it.’

M seemed very preoccupied with the writing of a formal letter at his desk. If he was annoyed at Bond showing up like this, he didn’t show it.

Bond always hated this office. It was so pompous and informal. His predecessor might have shared the same lack of taste, but at least she didn’t beat around the bush about it. She liked showing off her little British Bulldog figurine. It said something _about_ her. M’s office was just an office. He’d probably done it on purpose so that people like Bond would want to leave as quickly as they’d arrived.

A digital clock in the corner seemed uncertain whether it was 10:12 or 11:12, and it kept switching between the two.

Bond went on stubbornly, ‘I’m telling you, M, Q isn’t ready for this.’

‘We’ve had this discussion already,’ M pointed out calmly. ‘I’m telling you he is. Now get out of my office and do something useful with your time. There’s a very important case that needs your intention.’

Bond scoffed. ‘You don’t get to decide that. Who’s ready or not.’

M looked up from his letter. ‘Don’t I? Say that to the three people who got murdered in their offices in broad daylight because _someone_ had decided they should.’ M folded the letter and put it into an envelope. He did so with extreme, deliberate care because he knew it would piss Bond off if he elaborated on his point slowly. ‘These people, whoever they are, think that they’ve got their tracks covered up. That they’re _safe_ because the media didn’t pick up on their sins. That means they’re reckless.

‘Someone like Q – a brilliant hacker, someone with a history of inventing products such as the ones Clementine has made fit for mass-production – will fit in at Clementine Tech perfectly. People will not question him nor suspect his intentions because at the end of the day all these companies care about is turning a profit. Achieving results. They won’t bat an eyelid at someone like Q because they’ll be too busy watching their own backsides so they won’t get fired.’

‘Or killed,’ Bond added dramatically.

M ignored the comment and started addressing the envelope. Bond couldn’t see who it was for.

He wished he could convince M to let someone else go undercover.

He would trust Q with his life but he wouldn’t trust someone else with Q’s. The people he might be getting involved with were bad, dangerous people; people who would go out of their way to get what they wanted, whatever that was. Bond knew the sort.

He didn’t want Q to get anywhere near them.

The murderer of the three victims might be behind bars, but the threat was still there.

‘Let me go in,’ Bond said after he watched M demonstratively put a stamp on the envelope.

M smiled. ‘You don’t fit the brief, I’m afraid. Clementine is a company built and run by individuals much younger than the likes of you and I. You’d attract too much attention.’

‘Not if I played the game well enough.’

M put the envelope on the corner of his desk and got up from his chair. ‘007, I think what you’re really trying to say is that you don’t want Q to go in because he might be compromised. Get hurt,’ he added with emphasis. ‘You’re not the first to fall for him, you know. 009 —’

Bond took a deep breath as if composing himself. He knew that some people knew – M, Tanner, the lady at the reception downstairs – but he didn’t like it being mentioned like that, as if it was just childish office talk. What he and Q got up to – or in this case, _didn’t_ get up to – was none of M’s business. It was something he alone had to deal with. Too many people knowing or getting involved might lead to Q finding out. He didn’t want that, not yet. Perhaps not ever. He wasn’t sure whether Q was the kind of person who fell for people like him.

‘Will he be safe?’ Bond asked, a little less angrily.

M looked at Bond questioningly as he started towards his hatstand. ‘I cannot guarantee that. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Then send someone to keep an eye on him,’ Bond pressed him.

‘I will. Not you, though; I want you to keep an eye on the newly appointed head of Clementine instead. See what she’s up to,’ M said as he put on his coat. ‘I imagine this would all be a lot easier if she hired Cabot because she had an office grudge.’

‘And if she didn’t? Sir?’

M buttoned up his coat. He seemed for a moment lost in reminiscence. ‘There were rumours, years ago, about Clementine being bent. I would like them to _stay_ rumours.’

‘Why?’

‘Imagine being the sole manufacturer of a large percentage of computers and tablets in Britain. If I were a person with bad intentions, I’d want to use that position, wouldn’t you? Close the door on your way out, 007.’

With that, M left, leaving Bond to question whether he _himself_ was the right person for the job. With everything that was at stake, he might not be.


	2. In And Out Of Touch

Q hit the button as quickly as he could, but it was already too late.

There was a loud _bang_ , and he ducked just in time. A second later, and he would’ve been hit and quite potentially killed.

He crawled underneath the round conference table and waited and waited with closed eyes, heart racing in his throat — he thought of Bond, and how badly he wished he had asked him out when he had the chance —

The sound of his colleague’s screams filled the room, drowning out even the terrible sounds of machinery —

And then it stopped.

When Q got up from the floor and dusted off his trousers, the photocopier had disappeared behind a thick wall of smoke. There were crumpled sheets of A4 paper all over the carpet floor. Two colleagues, one of whom appeared to have been hit by a tiny but harmful piece of photocopier, quickly hurried out of the office and shot Q angry looks. The copier looked unrepairable.

A broken photocopier. That’s what Q was dealing with now. Not spies or murderers or, in fact, excitement of any kind, but _photocopiers._ The situation had, admittedly, been less dramatic than Q’s mind made it seem.

It was nice to pretend that Q was still dealing with matters of life and death, though. Tomorrow, he might have a run-in with a robotic and very dangerous vacuum cleaner.

Only one colleague remained, Harry. Q didn’t know his last name, but he’d been warned about him. Not by MI6, but by some of his . . . _kinder_ colleagues at Clementine. One of the oldest people in the Software department, Harry thought he owned the bloody place and apparently acted like it too. His face reminded Q a bit of a very tired bulldog.

Harry was looking at Q suspiciously. They’d never met, but Q had seen him sulk around the office before. ‘Don’t you know how to operate a simple copier, mate?’ Harry asked.

They were in a small office space on the second floor that was hardly ever used. The photocopier – the only one on this floor, and the only one to break down at least once a day – was only there because it took up too much space elsewhere. There weren’t any cameras. 

Q shook his head several times. ‘I’m so sorry Sir, I didn’t —’

‘Never mind that, who’re you anyway? Some new intern?’ Harry said. He pronounced the word ‘intern’ with contempt. Like he thought interns were beneath him.

He probably thought someone like Q was beneath him too.

‘I – I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced,’ Q stuttered, holding out a shaky hand. He’d been told by M to pretend he was a nervous, doe-eyed, inexperienced but brilliant young man who had a degree in Software Engineering. With people like Harry, who had been making him feel nervous from the get-go, it wasn’t a hard role to play. ‘I’m Owen? Owen Brellend?’

Harry ignored Q’s outstretched hand, so Q awkwardly dropped his arm to his sides.

‘How long have you been working ‘ere?’ Harry demanded.

Q blinked. ‘Four months. _Six_ ,’ he corrected himself with a little shake of his head. ‘Six months.’

It was hard to get the details of his cover story right. He was Owen Brellend. Did Marketing, then went to the Software department after getting a degree at the local university. Liked dogs. Didn’t have a relationship. Had been working for Clementine for over six months. He liked Mumford & Sons and kept a very tidy and organized desk. He spent his free time getting the best out of his Netflix subscription. Thought spy movies were tacky. Couldn’t afford much right now. His previous employer was a big-name manufacturer or games consoles, where he worked as an intern. He was probably straight.

Q hated Owen.

‘So why’ve I never seen you?’ said Harry, curious as ever.

‘I — I used to work for the Marketing department on the fifth floor, but then I was reinstated here, at Software. I only _really_ started four days ago. I . . .  followed a course in Software Engineering, at the local university?’ Q added when Harry squinted doubtfully.

‘Did you, now?’

‘Yes. It was _very_ good. But then —’ Q broke off, pretending to be remembering something, ‘I don’t have to tell you about that, do I? Yes, I think our supervisor told me about you. You’re the man who found that bug in the new —’

‘In the new operating system, yes,’ Harry said flatly, not at all fooled by Q’s flattery. ‘So what was you trying to copy?’

Q looked at the papers in his hands. This morning, he’d successfully managed to steal some important-looking papers from one of his colleagues that might prove Clementine’s involvement with criminal organisations. He had to pretend to be very interested in hearing his colleague Mandy talk about her best friend who got off with her ex-boyfriend, and then discreetly slip the papers off her desk when she was sobbing into her cup of tea. It only made him feel about ten years older.

‘They’re just findings that I wrote down during software testing this morning,’ Q said. His heart was beating fast. ‘They’re not very important.’

‘Let me see those,’ said Harry, hand already outstretched.

Q glanced at the door. ‘I really must be off, I —’

‘Give them to me,’ Harry ordered, and Q had no choice but to do as he was told.

A cloud passed over his colleague’s face as he flicked through the papers he had been given, and for a moment Q feared that he had been made. Q wondered then what would happen if he was found out. He might get killed. Or worse, people might think he’s not really an expert in computers.

‘A degree in Software Engineering, you said?’

Q nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Not bad,’ Harry said, and he actually looked like he meant it. He looked kinder, suddenly. ‘D’you want me to go and copy these for you? I was just gonna pop down and get a cup of coffee anyway.’

‘That would be extremely helpful,’ Q said, exhaling in relief in spite of himself. ‘Thank you — er?’

‘Harry,’ Harry said, and he left.

Two minutes later a technician showed up to fix the photocopier, and Q left him to it.

Q hoped he or Harry hadn’t seen the stolen papers in his pocket.

Working at Clementine Tech were some of the dullest days Q had ever experienced. When he was still young and hacking his way through every school computer he could find, he would have done anything for a chance to work at a company as awe-inspiring and successful as Clementine. Companies like Clementine, he felt, were changing the world one keyboard and smartphone at the time. Who else could say they were capable of that?

Back then, not _him_ , locked away at a university he didn’t want to be a part of.

But at the end of the day, this undercover mission was just another desk job, and a very boring one at that; there wasn’t much going on in the way of actual engineering, and the most productive thing he’d done so far, was point out a simple software error that a schoolboy could have seen.

Anyone could hack a computer or learn coding these days. The trick was to make yourself feel like doing so actually mattered.

Being here made Q realise that working for MI6 was by far the best path he could have ended up on. Being from a rather well-off, traditional family, Q’s parents absolutely disapproved of his wanting to study computer sciences. They just didn’t think it was a proper vocation. What good would knowing a lot about computers and coding and software do? Nothing, in their eyes. So, they sent Q to uni to study something harmless, something that fitted their own ideals of who their son should become. They didn’t know what Q spent most lessons coming up with little ideas in his notebooks or that he once hacked the headmaster’s computer and anonymously reported what he found to the police.

His parents also didn’t know that Q was shagging his – _male_ – roommate.

Then Q got caught looking at school files he wasn’t supposed to, and he thought his world was ending. It wasn’t. The professor who caught him turned out to be a former spy and claimed he knew someone who needed someone like Q. A solid promise and two years later, Q ended up at MI6. It was a good thing he did, too; just four days into this bloody undercover mission and he was already bored with the mediocrity of having a normal job.

Ironically, his parents still thought he worked in an office.

But we digress. His being a new face in a big but well-oiled company, Q was given all the leftover jobs like deciding whether the Clementine in an icon should be placed 1 pixel to the left? Worse still, he hadn’t seen any truly suspicious behaviour from any of his colleagues yet, and everyone was given a personal laptop so it’s not like he could hit up the IM with Moneypenny and Tanner and tell them what was going on.

The cloud that Q had been given access to via a protected web browser was proving unhelpful, too: all the files were above-board, and a simple search for ‘Alt-Delete’ or, in fact, any of the people who had been murdered yielded no results. The papers Q had carefully managed to ‘borrow’ were probably going to prove worthless as well.

His only shot, he knew, was getting into his boss’s computer.

His boss, or rather, the supervisor of the Software department on the second floor, always left the building at 9PM sharp. (Like Q, most employees at Clementine worked regular nine to five shifts.) The supervisor’s office was fitted with a card lock, and the computer protected with three passwords. There were cameras in every single corner on the second floor but for the office where Q had first met Harry.

The passwords were easy to figure out. The cameras were already being dealt with. It was getting a key card that was going to be tricky. Or, it was until a couple of minutes ago. He knew that the technicians carried universal key cards in case the supervisor’s computer had to be fixed or taken away, so Q had quietly managed to steal one off Paul the technician when he was busy fixing the copier that Q broke.

Sitting at his desk, Q was thinking about how he was going to kill time until nine when his phone rang. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the name on his screen. Bond’s. Bond _never_ phoned.

Employees weren’t allowed to phone under work time because it hindered productivity, so Q quickly left his desk under the pretence that he had to use the restroom and walked out of the office. He picked up the phone on the landing in front of the lifts.

Clementine’s UK headquarters, where products were designed, software was tested and clever marketing ploys were devised by young guys and girls in suits, was an impressive fifteen-storey building in the heart of London. Every floor was dedicated to another speciality: second floor, Software; sixth floor, Product Design, etcetera. The top floors were reserved for the people with the multi-million salaries. Up there, the brand new CEO had a large office the size of Q’s entire house, and it was rigged with one security measure after another. It would take Q several weeks to get into it; time he, unfortunately, didn’t have.

The top floors also housed the company’s better-equipped computers. That is to say, they were the computers one may want to hack into when looking for sensitive information.

One day soon, one of those computers would play a very big role indeed.

‘I didn’t realise we _did_ phone calls, 007,’ Q said. He was trying his best not to sound pleased. ‘Have you nothing better to do with your day?’

‘Stop calling me 007 while you’re undercover,’ said Bond, not unkindly. ‘How are you feeling?’

(God, he loved that voice.)

‘Like I want to resign already. How people have and enjoy regular jobs like this I _do_ not understand,’ Q said dramatically.

Bond chuckled. ‘Look out of the window.’

Q did as he was told. Being on the second floor, he could see Bond standing at the other side of the busy street that Clementine HQ was in front of. Pedestrians passed him left and right, and for a second Bond disappeared behind a double-decker bus. The bus followed the same route Q had taken that morning and the previous mornings since starting his mission. Unfortunately, being Owen Brellend also meant pretending that he couldn’t afford a car.

‘Oh look, it’s you,’ Q said, drily. ‘Has M sent you? He has, hasn’t he?’

Bond said nothing. ‘Come down. I have something to show you.’

Q hesitated. He did want to speak Bond, badly (mostly so he could stare at him again), but at what cost? Were surprise visits from 00 agents even allowed on undercover missions? Was this a test cleverly devised by MI6 to see whether he was up for the job?

What if this entire mission was just one big cock-up?

‘I — can’t,’ Q said in spite of his desire to see Bond again. ‘My employer has already reprimanded me for missing a deadline by two minutes yesterday. My credibility is on the line here.’

‘This is more important than your credibility. Trust me,’ Bond said before hanging up, and for a wonderful, fleeting moment Q seriously thought that Bond might be about to ask him out. Then he remembered who Bond was, and who _he_ – Q – was, and he got rid of the silly thought with a shake of his head. Bond, asking him out? Not a chance.

Q lied to his colleagues that he was going to copy something downstairs, and he left the building only two minutes after his phone call with Bond. As it was a sunny June morning, he’d not bothered to put his coat on. (Bond looked amazing in _his_ , right now. It was a long, lightweight summer coat that always made Q’s heart beat a little faster. Perhaps it was because it left so much to the imagination.)

Q nodded at Bond politely. _‘James.’_

He’d never called Bond ‘James’ before. It felt very odd.

He could get used to it.

‘ _Owen_ ,’ said Bond, amusedly. ‘Is that your _real_ name?’

‘It’s not,’ Q said flatly. (It really wasn’t.)

‘What _is_ your real name? Quintin? _Bob_? Luke. Quinn. I _like_ Quinn.’

For the sake of having something to say that did not involve indulging his real name, Q decided to pretend to be very annoyed with Bond being here. It was another part of his godawful cover story.

Q sighed in an exaggerated manner. ‘Honestly, 007, how can I possibly convince my –’ he waved his hands in the air as if literally fishing for words ‘– my . . . awfully contrived and _dull_ colleagues that I’m there to do my job if _you_ keep showing up?’ He glanced at the Clementine offices. ‘I already _have_ colleagues looking at me like I’m bloody hiding something because my cover story is the most implausible thing I’ve ever read.’

‘I don’t write the cover stories, sorry. And this is only the first time I’ve shown up here so I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Bond followed Q’s gaze. He thought he saw someone watching them from the fourth floor, so he gently shepherded Q into a different shopping street where they wouldn’t be seen. ‘Keep walking.’

Q ignored the heart palpitations he felt when Bond briefly put his hand on the small of his back to steer him.

‘I have a name,’ Bond said secretively. He thought he saw a man look at them strangely from the other side of the street, so he increased his pace.

‘Whose? Mine? Of the person who hired Cabot? _Tell_ me, Bond.’

‘Harry. Do you know him?’

Q had fallen into step with Bond. They were walking through the shopping streets like headless chicken on a bargain hunt. ‘Could you be a _little_ bit more specific?’

‘No. Do you know someone called Harry at Clementine?’

‘I work with one, yes. We’re in the same department, but that hardly makes him a suspect. Although he did insist I show him my findings on a piece of software this morning,’ Q added as if in remembrance.

‘Interesting. Were there any other papers this Harry asked them to show you?’ Bond said with emphasis.

Q shook his head. ‘I found some documents that might potentially prove Clementine’s involvement with criminal organisations earlier, but I didn’t tell Harry about them if that’s what you’re suggesting. Why?’

‘Cabot named him — well, _a_ Harry this morning. Said the name was mentioned by one of the people he killed. Your colleague could be involved with whatever Clementine have planned.’

Q looked around him uncomfortably. He didn’t feel so safe being here anymore. Then again, neither would going back to ‘work’ if these claims were to be believed.  ‘You’re saying one of the people I work with could be a cold-blooded murderer?’

‘Potentially.’

Q scoffed. ‘I’m enjoying this mission more and more,’ he said sarcastically. ‘If I get brutally murdered by an office stapler I’m resigning.’

‘What do you have on him?’

‘Harry?’ Q scratched the back of his neck. ‘Not much, to be fair. I was told to stay away from him by colleagues. Rumour has it he once stole a colleague’s work and pretended it was his own, but he never got charged for plagiarism or something of the sort so he’s probably in good stead with his employer. I only really spoke to him this morning. Keeps himself to himself, but not unpleasantly so. _Very_ bossy,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘but not particularly cruel. Seems to enjoy being complimented, but then who doesn’t?’

Bond smirked. ‘Go on.’

They headed into yet another street. The image of the tall, fifteen-storeyed Clementine building was slowly receding in the background. Q knew he was running the risk of pissing off his colleagues if he didn’t return from his supposed visit to the copier on the first floor soon.

Q thought about it, quickly. ‘What I don’t understand is,’ he said slowly, ‘why would a relatively well-paid, feared but also successful office worker want to harm the CEO of the company he works for? This company is a — a structured hierarchy. If _I_ wanted to move up the ladder, here, at Clementine, I’d have to kill the person with the best desk in the Software Department, not the person who runs the bloody ship.’

Bond groaned. ‘You’re right, it doesn’t make sense.’

‘Has M considered that this _might_ not be a case for MI6 after all?’

‘He’s adamant.’ Bond shook his head infinitesimally. ‘No, there has to be more to it. There’s something we’re not seeing.’

Deciding that they were no longer at risk of being followed, Bond stopped at a park. People were busy eating their packed lunches on benches. It made Q realise he hadn’t eaten all day – such was the demand of his job –, and he felt his stomach rumble. He wondered if he could get away with asking Bond to have lunch with him, but then wouldn’t that constitute as a date? 

‘Tell me about the rest of your colleagues,’ Bond said, with interest.

Q shrugged. ‘Like I said, they’re extremely dull.’

‘And what do they wear?’ Bond asked with emphasis.

‘What our employer asks of us. A dress shirt, doesn’t matter which colour, a _tie_ —’ Q broke off, and his eyes went wide. ‘ _Shit._ I forgot about the tie.’

He’d been warned about it by the colleague who showed him around on his first day. If you didn’t dress conform to company rules, there was a big chance you’d be dragged out of the office by your ear only days into your employment. Clementine took these things very seriously, and Q hadn’t. He’d already failed the first test.

‘Second rule of undercover,’ Bond said in a slightly exasperated manner as he un-knotted his own tie and pulled it free, ‘blend in.’

Q swallowed as Bond edged closer. ‘And the first?’

‘Stay still,’ Bond ordered, and he put the tie around Q’s neck and gently slid it beneath Q’s upturned collar with those large, amazing hands of his. It made Q’s legs feel like jelly.  

‘W-what’s the first rule of going undercover?’ Q repeated nervously. He inhaled sharply when Bond’s fingers brushed his neck, and caught himself transfixed by Bond’s hands, so close and so, so experienced as he worked his magic.

(Q would be lying if he said he’d never had fantasies involving ties. And Bond.)

‘First rule of undercover,’ Bond said, ignoring the guilty flush that had spread over Q’s cheeks, ‘don’t cock it up.’ He pushed up the knot a little. (Q wished he’d push it up a little higher. And _higher_.) Bond arranged the tie so that it was perfectly in the middle of Q’s chest, and neatly readjusted the shirt collar. His hands lingered on Q’s body for far longer than they should.

When Bond was finished, Q had an immaculate tie around his neck and a very, very bad feeling somewhere in the pit of his stomach. Even as his undercover personage he wouldn’t be able to get away with how badly he wanted Bond to be his right now.

Q pretended very hard not to feel incredibly flustered by it all. ‘Oh joy, I have a tie around my neck. I’ll feel so much safer going back into this undercover mission, 007, thank you. They’ll be able to _strangle_ me now instead of shooting me if I find out things I shouldn’t,’ he said, his sarcasm not quite hiding the nerves in his voice.

Ignoring the sarcastic comments, Bond inspected his own handiwork. Still not entirely convinced, Bond actually went and pushed Q’s sleeves up to his elbows. Again, there was that lingering feeling of fingers against skin that made Q feel like he was actually, genuinely burning up.

‘People who’ve made computers their life’s work tend not to care about what they look like,’ Bond explained when Q looked at questioningly. His hands felt so, so strong on his arms like that. ‘You work for an electronics company, not a law firm. If you look _too_ smart, people will think you’re an intern who cares too much about being taken seriously. You need to look casual.’ 

Q swallowed. ‘Hence my forgetting the tie.’

‘I said uncaring, not careless,’ Bond said, and he put his hands back inside the pockets of his coat when he was done.

Q looked cute with his arms on show like that.

Bond added, apropos of nothing, ‘Stay away from that Harry character. Contact me when you find something.’

‘I will.’

Bond was about to leave, but Q stopped him.

‘Bond? Do you trust me? I mean, do you trust me to do this job properly?’

‘Like I said,’ said Bond, not quite looking at Q, ‘don’t cock it up.’

*

Q had cocked up, big time. He should have _thought_ before heading straight into the lion’s den that was his supervisor’s office. He should have talked and actually listened to Bond or M instead of assuming he could pull this off on his own. He couldn’t. This was bigger than Q. This was bigger than all of them. Even MI6 wasn’t ready for an invasion of this size.  

In the end, technology always won. He should have known that by now.

Normally, Q’s days consisted of guiding 00 agents through these oh so dangerous missions of glass walls and corridors. He’d open up doors for them, cleverly disable cameras and, of course, tell them where to go next. Go straight ahead. Enter the room on your left. Be aware of the guards on the third floor. Try not to attract attention to yourself. Safe behind his laptop, it was child’s play for Q.

But now, Q was exploring the depths of the Clementine building on his own, unassisted. After finishing work at 5PM sharp and saying goodbye to his colleagues, Q quietly sneaked into a restroom when no-one was looking and stayed there. He waited and waited with nothing to do. Hours crept slowly by. He wondered whether it would be worth it. It might be, but at what cost? He wondered if he might get away with sending Moneypenny a quick text about how he was getting on, but his phone only had 5% of battery life left and he didn’t want to waste it. He was starting to _doubt_ that it was worth it.

Then 8:30 came. After checking that he was definitely alone, Q quietly slipped out of the restroom and started towards his supervisor’s office. It was dark. Not a single light was on. An app on his phone was transmitting signals that more or less disabled all the surveillance cameras on the second floor, so he was confident that he wouldn’t be spotted. He’d be safe. He had the key card for his supervisor’s office in his pocket. He was already thinking about how he would hack his computer.

Then the security guard walked in.

‘Stop right there!’ the guard cried, and Q made a run for it!

In the dark of the night he couldn’t see where he was going, so Q hit his foot against a metal trash can and fell into the shadows — he crawled over the floor, scrambling to get up, but he couldn’t; he was too scared, too frightened of failing his mission — he was already regretting everything that had to do with it —

Then he heard it.

The cocking of a gun.

‘Get up,’ ordered the security guard. He wasn’t going to ask twice.

This was it. This was Q, messing it up. Four days into this mission, and he had already failed miserably. Either he would be thrown out of the building with no chance of getting back in, his undercover story torn to pieces — or he’d be killed right here for being somewhere he shouldn’t.

Things were looking bad.

Terrified, Q slowly got up from the floor, hands in the air once he got back on his feet — and saw the guard not pointing his gun at Q, but at Harry. His colleague.

Quickly, Q hid behind an office plant to watch the scene unfold. His heart was beating fast. For a moment he feared the guard would hear it.

The security guard: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Just finishing up work,’ said Harry. Q couldn’t see his face from where he was standing, but he sounded like he was lying. He didn’t sound scared, which told Q he’d done something like this before.

Q wasn’t sure what it _was_ that Harry was doing. Sneaking around in the middle of the night like him, yes, but for what purpose?

The guard scoffed. ‘ _Sure_. You’re one of _them_ , aren’t you?’ He was silent, then, ‘So you _are_. I see. So who sent you then, eh? The police? _MI6_?’

Q started, but the words weren’t aimed at him. The guard had no idea he was there.

The guard went on, randomly, ‘You lot think you can stop what we’re doing, but you can’t. The wheels are already in motion. All of this,’ – the guard made a gesture that encompassed the entire office, with all its computers and screens – ‘has been ready for years. _Decades_. ‘S just a matter of time now.’

‘Is that why Kaye was killed? Cos she tried to stop you?’ asked Harry, and Q’s heart skipped a beat at the realisation that he and Harry were probably on the same side. The guard sounded different, somehow. Malicious. ‘You mean like _you_?’

Q thought he’d been clever to mess with the cameras. There would never be proof of his sneaking around the building at night.

There also wouldn’t be proof of Harry having been shot dead by a security guard.


	3. Through Electronic Desire

Q slumped into the next best seat, exhausted and disoriented, and dying to get home.

_Dying to get home_. What an odd phrase.

He almost forgot to touch in at the start of his journey, and shakily got out his Oyster Card. Two or three pennies dropped out of his pocket as he did so, and rolled onto the floor. He didn’t bother picking them up. Q looked like a right mess with his shaking hands and unfocussed eyes, and so the bus driver was still watching him warily as they slowly departed out of the station. He must’ve seen the blood on Q’s hands. Harry’s.

Q could still hear the shot ringing in his ears when the guard disappeared into the shadows.

He’d witnessed quite a few terrible things over the course of his career, including, unfortunately, more deaths, but he couldn’t believe that the guard had just _left_ Harry there, on the floor, his blood staining the carpet. Someone would find Harry there that morning and experience the worst day of their life. They might even resign, and why shouldn’t they? These killings couldn’t be explained anymore.

When Q left his hiding place and started slowly towards the dark shape on the floor, bile came up his throat. It was an awful sight, and yet he was transfixed by it, _intrigued_ ; this was a dead person. One moment Harry was alive, and the next he was not. He would not even have been aware of taking his last breath, not stopped to consider that he’d just blinked for the final time. He just — stopped.

‘You all right, mate?’ the bus driver asked, and Q gave him a small nod.

‘It’s just been a long day, thank you, Sir,’ Q lied, and he stared out of the window to see the world pass him by. He hadn’t even noticed how much he was shaking until he saw his reflection in the window, so white and frail.

Q thought that if he touched Harry, his colleague might come back to life.

He stayed dead.

This wasn’t his first time seeing a dead person. It’d happened before, on a mission Q had conveniently blocked from his memory. (Something having to do with a politician.) The moment he saw the body, changed beyond belief, Q threw up and left the scene of the crime. He never mentioned it, but he saw the dead woman’s face in his dreams for the rest of the month, and the one after that. He didn’t want to think about how long he’d get over seeing Harry’s.

Q got up from the floor, wiped his hands on the back of his trousers and sighed, deeply. He knew, deep down, that there was work to be done. He‘d been brought here for a reason, and that reason was only a few feet away, locked behind a reinforced door that only he had the keys to.

And yet he lingered. There wasn’t a single part of Q that wanted to go through with this. It felt wrong after what had happened; he’d rather stay here, with Harry, and apologise for doubting his intentions for even a second. He’d ask him what he did to the papers he had given them, and what he really thought of them, and why he had come here in the first place — but then he felt the technician’s key card burn inside his pocket, and remembered. This might be his only chance. For all he knew, Harry had been planning to do the same thing.

He directed a pointless ‘sorry’ at Harry’s body and started towards his supervisor’s office. Fear very much having taken a hold on his body, his legs felt heavier and heavier with every step he took.

Q could still see the blood stain on the carpet in his mind, so he closed his eyes tight as if blocking it out. He tried to focus instead on the young couple that had gotten on the bus. (They were talking about their upcoming holiday to Berlin.) The man in his fifties, on the phone to his wife. (He seemed angry.) The rattling sounds as the bus drove across a humpy road. The doors, opening and closing to let people in and out. A group of loud teenagers who only stayed on the bus for two stops. He imagined Bond getting on the bus and holding him tight.

He got out the key card he had stolen and swiped it against the lock. The door opened almost instantly.

There wasn’t time to take in his surroundings. All he saw, was the computer on his supervisor’s desk. It looked brand new, and Q guessed he might not be able to find any files that the old CEO owned. With everything that had happened to her, this might not be a good thing.

Q still remembered the first time he had successfully hacked a computer. It was his mum’s private laptop so it wasn’t exactly something to write home about, but there was something very powerful and _addictive_ about being able to enter spaces he wasn’t supposed to, like sneaking around school at night. Then, of course, came the school computers and online fora and, later, government websites, but nothing quite beat that first time. It was a moment he treasured, somehow. If he could survive his mother’s wrath, he might be able to survive this too.

He wiped his hands on his trousers once more and got to work. Typing at great speed, he was ‘in’ within seconds. It wasn’t even difficult.

He didn’t think that was odd.

A voice announced the name of Q’s stop, and he got out without swiping his Oyster Card again. The walk from the bus stop to his house was a short one, but it was made longer with his legs feeling like lead.

Even in the comforts of his front garden, he still couldn’t believe the things he’d seen tonight. If his witnessing Harry’s murder wasn’t enough, the files Q had hacked into proved that Clementine, as an organisation, was utterly corrupt. A danger for society, arguably.

In a folder hidden away behind various complicated passwords, he pulled up file after file of deaths that the company had covered up: the deaths of the two CEOs, indeed, but also the deaths of people Q didn’t recognise.

A simple search told Q that they had been regular consumers. Normal citizens like you and me. A girl whose smartphone had exploded in her face. A woman, found dead at her computer. A death involving a man and a dishwasher. Numerous instances, then, of Clementine products malfunctioning and _killing_ people, intentionally or no. 

Q counted 13 cases in one folder. In the next, 20 more. In total, there were about 100 of them, all fairly random people with no ties to Clementine other than that they owned their products. None of the deaths had been investigated by the police. Not one.

He stopped in his tracks when he thought he heard something in his front garden, and so didn’t notice when he accidentally dropped his phone. It fell onto the grass with a soft, near-quiet _thud_ , its screen now cracked and unrepairable.  

Every case file ended with the same words, and suddenly things clicked. He understood now.

Q pushed his key into the lock and opened the door. As if still in a bit of a daze, he neglected to take his coat off and turned on the lights in a half-arsed, disoriented manner. He figured he’d probably get away with postponing sending his report to MI6. For now, he just wanted to have a cup of tea and calm down. Calm down, and sleep. Forget about the things he’d seen. Forget about Harry.

He petted his cats Pertwee and Baker and promised that he’d feed them later. He’d gotten his cats from a mate of his, on his birthday. Baker, his favourite, was a lazy black cat who had bad eyesight and ran into cupboards and doors a lot. Pertwee spent most of his time outdoors. Once, he came back after a night’s hunting with a small bird in his mouth, and Q had to clean the feathers off his sofa. When he gave Pertwee a very long lecture about not taking dead birds home, the white cat just sort of stared at him like he didn’t give a damn. 

The same words were slapped onto every single case file. They had to do with every death Clementine was involved in, and they were the one thing that Q couldn’t for the life of him figure out. Until now.

‘Project Alt-Delete initiated.’ 

There was a tremendous _bang_ , and Q’s front door flew off its hinges.

Again: ‘Project Alt-Delete initiated.’ 

Light from the street lamps flooded the entrance hall, allowing Q to see a — an object, large and mechanic, and utterly _terrifying_ — Q didn’t know what it was, but it was headed straight for him, actually _walking_ — he could only describe it as a Cyberman, but Cybermen weren’t real so he didn’t know what on Earth he was dealing with —

Bond received a phone call two minutes later.

\-->

To the general public, the new CEO of Clementine was presented as a credible person. Her CV, which was available online for some inexplicable reason, checked out. Every company she claimed to have worked for existed. All her previous employers said that she was a joy to be around with, and that she was, of course, by far the best person for the Clementine job. Her list of skills was considerable, and her list of contacts even longer. Her personality was a complete mystery.

So why was she never _there_? Why, indeed, had not a single employee like ‘Owen Brellend’ or his questionable colleagues ever seen her? Where was she hiding?

A quick break-in visit to her penthouse in London turned out to be fruitless. The elusive CEO wasn’t there, and neither was much else. The penthouse, which had a multi-million-pound view on the entire city, was completely empty. There were no chairs, no tables. No boxes or personal effects. Weirdly, no electronics either: nothing to make the penthouse feel even _remotely_ like a soon-to-be home. Odd, Bond thought, for the media claimed that the CEO had moved into her penthouse only days after her appointment. God knows who was paying for it. Perhaps the rumours about Clementine being funded by criminal organisations were true after all.

Previously, Bond had already tried all the other places the CEO was supposedly tied to: her old home in Newcastle; the hotel where her previous employer often held conferences in; the office where she allegedly first got into contact with software engineering — they were all deserted or boarded up. It was as if she had left a deliberate tail of fake breadcrumbs to follow. (Or, alternatively, left a trail of destruction.) But for what purpose? If she didn’t want to be seen in public, why take on this job at all? Nothing about this woman was adding up.

Worryingly, Q hadn’t made much process either. He hadn’t reported on anything he’d done thus far, and when Bond saw him that morning he was acting like a bloody mess who didn’t know the first thing about going undercover. And what had he done so far? Make bloody copies of documents and get himself into trouble by forgetting his _tie_.

At least it meant that he was safe, and alive. The threat wasn’t likely to be at Clementine HQ itself, or Q would have seen something already. As long as Q was out of danger, Bond could deal with him being away on missions. He might even be able to cope with that odd feeling of missing him.

Bond wasn’t really _used_ to missing people. In his world of spies and danger, the phrase ‘I missed him’ meant that he lucked out on eliminating someone. It was another word for failing; Bond’s least favourite thing in the world. But now, ‘missing’ someone meant hating not being around that person. It meant that he could no longer make fun of Q for naming his cats after two science-fiction actors, and that a brand new gun was handed to him by some faceless Q-Brancher this morning. (The gun wasn’t even very good.)

Q would probably laugh in his face if he told him that he missed him. He wasn’t even sure if the Quartermaster rolled that way, and if he did — who was to say that he was Q’s type at all? Perhaps he was more into skinny, sensitive guys like 009 who looked like they’d never had a good shag.

Assuming he must have missed something Bond, checked the CEO’s penthouse for clues one more time — and came up empty. There was truly nothing there; no documents hidden underneath floorboards, no memory sticks stowed away in bathroom cabinets, no spare phones forgotten about — nothing. There was nothing to tell him what Alt-Delete was, if it even existed. The CEO was still as faceless as she was before Bond got here.

At this rate, everything might just be a very efficient ruse, a way to get people like him to look the other way. The CEO might not even exist.

Bond was wondering whether there might be cameras in place when his phone rang. It was Q.

He checked the time. 9:46. Q’s shift had long ended by now, which could only mean one thing.

<\--

The thing, whatever it was, destroyed everything in its path as it slowly moved towards Q like a great, big, mechanical giant from the stories he used to read when he was a young lad.

It stuck his fist through another wall, and photos of Q’s family came crashing down.

Except this wasn’t a giant. It was long and slender like a very large, skinny human, and yet it had the strength to crush walls with its bare hands.

It pushed a vase off a cabinet, demonstratively so.

Q wondered what would remain of his body if that thing ever got to him.

With its metal body painted white like the back of a brand new electronic tablet, the electronic menace was almost aesthetically beautiful. The metal joints in its legs sounded like oiled machinery. Its face – if that _was_ a face – had a large crack in it. It was the only thing about it that seemed broken.

Under normal circumstances, Q would have loved to find out who made it, and why. Find out what made it tick. Investigate how a thing so large and powerful could move so effortlessly. He would take it apart and stare at every bolt and beautiful piece of machinery until he knew how to replicate it and make it better.

A cupboard was broken into two.

_It_ was bloody terrifying.

Panicking slightly now, Q shoved his hands inside his pockets. He would call someone – _anyone_ – and get the hell out of here.

His phone wasn’t there.

He thought, quickly. The robot – yes, _robot_ – was blocking the entrance hall, so there was no way he could escape the house unless he went through the back garden, but he needed a key to open that door and in his panic he couldn’t remember where he’d put it.

Trying to attack the robot? Stop it? Not an option.

He might taunt the robot into punching a hole into the wall so he could escape, but then —

There was a spare phone in the kitchen. He could use it to call the police. But what on Earth would he say? _I’m so sorry, police officer, Sir, but I’m being attacked by a robot in my living room?_

Then he remembered he knew Bond’s phone number by heart. All six of them.

But then he’d first have to run into the kitchen —

His sofa was the only thing that separated Q from the robot  — he realised now that he was in tremendous danger, more so than he was still at risk of being caught by the security guard at Clementine — there was only one thing for it; kill or be killed . . .

‘Look! It’s R2-D2!’ Q randomly exclaimed, pointing at nothing in particular, and he did a runner as the robot turned its stupid, cracked face towards the window. Having bought himself three or four extra seconds, he ran into the kitchen and slammed the door shut. He shoved a wooden chair underneath the doorknob and hoped that it would hold.

He should probably have listened to M when he said that he might want to consider installing a safe room somewhere. His impromptu safe room was now his kitchen, and his weapon of choice – he looked around him – a butter knife. Yes, that would work very well to stop an enormous, homicidal robot indeed.

Hands shaking even more than before, Q opened drawer after drawer until he finally found what he was looking for: his spare phone. He pressed the ON button and waited — he could hear the robot making a big racket as it headed towards him, but Q didn’t have the time to think about the damage —

The menu screen glowed into life, and Q quickly entered Bond’s phone number —

\-->

Heart churning, Bond answered immediately.

‘Bond! Thank God! I —’

‘ _Q_?’

_Crash!_

Bond could hardly hear what Q was saying. There was a great noise in the background as if Q were standing in the middle of a construction site, and he understood immediately that Q needed help, fast. There wasn’t a single other reason why Q would be phoning him.

_Bang!_

A scream from Q —

‘Q, slow down,’ Bond told a panting Q over the phone. He hastened out of the deserted penthouse, slammed the door shut, and jabbed the button for the lift. ‘Where are you?’

‘At home.’

More noise. Something broke or exploded. He thought he could hear Q scream again, louder.

Bond swore when the words OUT OF ORDER appeared on a small LED screen next to the lift. He decided to take the stairs instead. All 374 steps of them.

This didn’t look good.

‘What’s going on?’

_Crash!_

‘There’s a bloody — in my —’

‘Q, I can’t _hear_ you.’

Bond was running down the stairs fast now, skipping two steps at a time. His heartrate had increased in the realisation that something very bad must be happening to Q indeed. He needed to get there, fast.

He’d never forgive himself if Q got hurt. _Never_.

‘There’s a —’ Q broke off, and a short tone signalled the end of the conversation.

<\--

Q dropped the phone the moment the robot punched its way through the door.


	4. Through The Carnage Of The Crash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bond helps Q undress.

When Bond arrived at Q’s house half an hour after the call, in the dark of the late evening, he didn’t even have to knock; the door had been blown off its hinges as though something very large had pushed its way through it. What, Bond couldn’t even begin to imagine. Whatever Q faced here must have been scarier than a million burglars, murderers or trespassers.

When Bond stepped inside and went into the living room, he was greeted by an enormous mess that made his heart tighten with worry for Q. The sofa had half been shot to pieces. There was glass everywhere. A cat, white and fluffy, was cowering in fear underneath a closet. Q’s laptop was beyond repair. There was a large hole the size of a small motorcycle in the kitchen door. Photo frames of Q’s friends and family lay in pieces on the floor. Even one of the windows that overlooked the back garden hadn’t survived what Bond could only describe as an _assault_.

It was no longer a home. Q, his beautiful, innocent Quartermaster, had been attacked.

Bond was going to find whoever had done this and make them pay.

He found Q on the floor a minute later, back against the wall, body shaking. His knees were pulled up to his chest. There was blood on his shirt, but it couldn’t have been his; Q didn’t seem to have any injuries apart from a scratch that Bond assumed was a cat’s doing. He looked distraught. Miles away.

Bond wished he – himself, that is – was a hugging person. If he was, he’d give Q a big hug and massage his hair until the terror left Q’s eyes. Until Q looked like himself again. But Bond wasn’t very good at hugs and neither, he thought, was Q, so he skipped the bit where they’d talk about how they were feeling and went straight into getting to the bottom of this matter like a good agent should.

The feeling of how utterly _terrified_ Bond was of something happening to Q still lingered on his skin. He’d never felt fear like it. Imagine that; being a spy, and a good one at that, and experiencing a certain type of fear for the first time in his life. He’d been through everything. He’d faced entire armies. But this, tonight? That was something else.

Something large lay in big pieces before Q. Bond couldn’t see what it was. It looked like a machine or device of some kind. Clementine-made, probably.

‘What happened here, Q?’ he asked.

Q ignored the question.

‘Have I ever told you that I spent all my savings on refurbishing this place? Every last penny from every single bank account I ever owned?’ Q said, sounding very anxious indeed. His voice was trembling and so were his hands as he spoke, ‘I did everything myself. Windows, shelves, electrics, the bloody wallpaper, _all_ of it I did on my own. If you look carefully, _there_ ,’ – He nodded at something on the ceiling – ‘you may even be able to make out a camera. Can you see?’

Bond nodded. He saw it.

‘It stopped working the _day_ I went undercover at Clementine Tech. My _laptop_ stopped working the next. My _dishwasher_ is no longer functional. And I thought, _Okay,_ _I’ll fix this, whatever this is._ I can mend things. I’m relatively sure I’m competent at that. I know one computer program from another and am capable of inventing things that others have never even _dreamt_ of creating.’

Q looked at the broken device in front of him. He looked at it with fear and contempt. ‘But I’ve never seen technology quite as unique and destructive as that. Imagine that,’ he added absently. ‘Imagine knowing _everything_ there is about technology but not knowing what the fuck is about to kill you. Quite ironic, isn’t it?’

Bond looked at it. The thing. He saw that it must once have been a sizable object, but his mind couldn’t fill in the blanks.

‘It’s a robot. A droid, technically,’ Q explained when he saw Bond’s vacant stare. He was starting to sound a bit more like the Quartermaster now. ‘It was sent here to kill me.’

Bond tried not to let the thought rattle him. ‘That, or it wasn’t a fan of your interior design. I mean, that wallpaper . . .’

Q opened his mouth to say something, but closed it when he spotted something that Bond didn’t. As though electrocuted, he got up with haste and picked up a part of the droid that looked familiarly like a mechanical finger.

‘Can you see that?’ Q said, holding out the finger.

Q looked like he hadn’t had a rest since Bond saw him that morning. With the clock slowly reaching 11, he wondered if Q shouldn’t just head to bed and sleep all of this off. The robot would still be there to examine in the morning. His house, too, would still be there, albeit in a different shape.

‘Q, I think you need to—’

‘007, _look_ at it.’

Reluctantly, Bond took the finger. He could vaguely make out the brand new Clementine Tech logo on a bolt. When the new CEO took over, the Clementine logo immediately went through a redesign as if everything that the company had done previously was being neglected entirely. The general public didn’t think much of it, but MI6 thought it suspicious: could it be a sign that the new company was, indeed, not as reliable as it seemed?

‘It’s Clementine’s,’ Bond said. ‘That’s not surprising, is it?’

‘Yes, but — It’s made of the same material as our MI6 smartphones, don’t you _see_ , 007?’ said Q, exasperated. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It’s the same colour. The same _make_. I,’ – Q took a deep breath – ‘I think this might have _been_ my smartphone.’

‘Q . . .’

‘I lost my phone on the way here. If you were to go and find it, I’d hazard a guess that you wouldn’t be able to find it again. Because it’s _here_ , 007’ Q added dramatically when Bond said nothing.

Bond understood that being attacked by a . . . robot (?) had rattled Q, but there was more going on here. There was something that Q hadn’t told him, and it had everything to do with the blood that was all over his shirt. All over his _tie_. Judging by the erratic, absent way Q was acting, he probably hadn’t even noticed it himself.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Q added when Bond shot him a worried glance.

‘I —’ Bond was about to argue that smartphones generally weren’t known for becoming homicidal robots when he saw a familiar inscription on what looked a bit like a kneecap. He picked it up, and saw a codename.

Q’s.

‘This is your smartphone,’ Bond said slowly. He stared at the former robot, still not fully understanding what had happened. ‘ _How_?’

Q put his hands on his hips and shrugged. It was the first time Bond had seen him out of his depth like that. ‘I don’t know. I’m always wary of where I leave my phone so the only possibility is that someone hacked into the phone’s mainframe and rebooted the system from a considerable distance. Changed its function, as it were, like telling a – a calculator that it’s suddenly a game console.’ He paused, then added, ‘I must admit it’s a _very_ excessive way to tell someone they’ve been sacked.’

‘Clementine can do that? Change a phone into —’

‘Clearly.’

‘But _how_? Phones are small, Q. That’s the whole idea. That _thing_ —’

Q sighed. ‘I don’t have the answers to everything, do I, 007?’

Then a question popped into Bond’s head. _The_ question. The one that he had never even imagined he would consider.

‘Could Clementine do it to every single device?’

Q swallowed. He knew the answer, of course. He’d seen it on the computer in his supervisor’s office, but he’d forgotten it. Blocked it out after everything that had happened because if he remembered what he’d seen for even a moment he would no longer be able to talk and think. He said, softly, ‘It would explain why your phone hasn’t stopped vibrating since you got here.’

Bond hadn’t even noticed it. Slowly, he moved his hand to his pocket and got out his phone. It was vibrating even though no one was phoning him. He didn’t even have a signal, and when he went to check his message log, it had been wiped clean. All his messages from Tanner that morning had disappeared. There was no proof that he’d phoned Q more than half an hour ago. It was as if someone or something was trying to infiltrate everything they did.

‘I’m slowly beginning to understand why so many people think technology is ruining modern society,’ Bond said, and he jabbed his phone OFF with his thumb and put it back inside his pocket. He’d worry about it later.

The robot’s head, humanly shaped, had been separated from the rest of its body. There was a crack where its face should be, and Bond squatted on the floor so he could look at it. ‘How did you stop it?’

‘Hit it with a cricket bat,’ Q sniffed. He didn’t elaborate.

Bond ran his fingers over the robot’s equivalent of an arm. It was still intact. If he looked carefully, he saw several places where the barrel of a gun might have been. Q wouldn’t have stood a chance, cricket bat or not.

Clementine Tech, a multinational technology company founded in the ideal that technology should be available for everyone, had created a _weapon_.

This mission wasn’t just a simple undercover mission anymore. It was no longer about finding out why several deaths had been covered up by the police.

It was an invasion.

‘You think Project Alt-Delete is involved in this?’ Bond asked.

Q ignoring the question told Bond everything he needed to know. Of _course_ it was.

‘I’m scared, 007,’ Q admitted softly. There were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m bloody terrified. My . . . _home_ has been violated,’ he said with a gesture that encompassed the living room. ‘All my — work . . . Clementine — they’re _everywhere_. How can I possibly —’ he broke off, and hiccupped.

Bond got up from the floor and rested a reassuring hand on Q’s arm. For a moment forgetting that he didn’t ‘do’ hugs, Bond seriously considered embracing Q until the fear left his body.

In Q’s eyes, Bond could see that he wanted it too. To be held tight.

Q wouldn’t even have to say the word. That look in his eyes was enough.

But they were both too terrified to do it.

‘I’m making you a cup of tea,’ Bond said instead, and he started towards the ruined kitchen a little distractedly. ‘I’m assuming our robot friend didn’t shoot the tea kettle?’

Q lingered. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened? Shouldn’t I be debriefed?’

‘Not until you’ve calmed down.’ (Translation: _I’m not leaving until I’ve seen you smile again._ )

*

Bond returned to the living room ten very long minutes later with the most exquisite cup of tea Q had had in a long time. It was a rooibos infusion that Q couldn’t even remember having bought, with the perfect amount of milk added. It almost made the sitting room smell of autumn nights spent reading in front of the hearth: nights that Q loved but had no more time for with this job.

The smell of destruction was suddenly no more.

Q didn’t feel comfortable leaving the pieces of the broken droid out of his sight, so they sat on his ruined sofa together. He left the sugar cubes that Bond had left on his saucer untouched.

‘I tried contacting MI6 in your kitchen, but there’s still no signal,’ Bond said, looking at his phone and putting it back in his pocket when Q shot it a worried glance. ‘I’ll try again later. They’ll probably want to analyse our robot friend here.’

‘Have you tried the landline?’

‘Same story.’

Q sighed. ‘At least that corroborates the evidence I found on my supervisor’s computer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Project Alt-Delete,’ Q explained as he took another sip of tea. He looked calmer than before, and Bond made a mental note to make Q another cup of tea later. ‘They’re — (sigh) it’s a conspiracy, essentially. There are almost one hundred reports of deaths being covered up by Clementine. Not just CEOs — _everyone_. A man was _decapitated_ by his coffee machine, and no one bothered to look into it. It was swept underneath the carpet. And what they all have in common is Alt-Delete.’

‘Go on.’

‘If my smartphone was turned into _that_ ,’ – Q waved a hand at the robot without really looking at it – ‘Then what _else_ might be capable of being turned into what’s effectively a weapon? My laptop? The computer in M’s office? The mp3-player my 6-year-old neighbour owns? What if – theoretically – every single piece of Clementine technology has, by default, a — an undetectable component? A virus, as it were. What if someone had the power to turn on that virus at will?’

‘So what you’re saying is that those deaths that Clementine covered up weren’t accidents?’

Q swallowed. His cup of tea was rattling against the saucer underneath it, so he deftly put the saucer on the half-broken tea table. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, 007.’

‘Shit.’

There came a silence that neither of them knew how to fill, so they both quietly enjoyed their tea while they thought about the consequences of their discovery. If what they’d discovered was true, then not only the innocent employees of Clementine were in danger.

_Imagine being the sole manufacturer of a large percentage of computers and tablets in Britain. If I were a person with bad intentions, I’d want to use that position, wouldn’t you?_

That’s what M had said. What if he had a point?

Q put his cup on the tea table after he’d finished it. When he realised he no longer had something to hold on to, he took the cup again and pretended there was still some tea in it before clutching the cup tight. He kept looking at the robot on the floor as if half-expecting it to surge back into life at any moment. He wasn’t feeling as calm as Bond thought he was.

‘You don’t have to stay here, 007,’ Q whispered, only so he had something to say.

‘I do. Someone needs to keep an eye out.’

That rubbed Q up the wrong way. ‘I don’t know how many times I have to say this: I’m not some child that needs looking after. I can handle myself, thank you,’ he added, with another pretend sip of tea that didn’t disguise how much he was shaking still.

‘I meant keep an eye on this guy,’ Bond said with a nod at the droid on the floor.

‘Ah,’ Q said. ‘Then I’ll stay here too.’

‘You can go to bed if you want to.’

Q shook his head infinitesimally. ‘I don’t want to be alone right now,’ he admitted softly, and Bond went and made him more tea before giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

*

Q had a dream that Bond was caressing his neck with his fingertips.

Falling deeper and deeper, Q was only vaguely aware of the skin under his ear being gently massaged. It sent little pinpricks of pleasure and comfort through Q’s unconsciousness until he finally fell into a deep, safe slumber.

In the dream, they were deeply in love, and dating: suddenly, Q was in an expensive restaurant that only ‘dream’ him could afford, and Bond showed up in a suit. They greeted each other with a kiss. The food, although world’s removed from what Q usually ordered on nights out, was exquisite — even the completely bonkers dessert. It was the perfect, stereotypical image of the first date Q had been wanting to have for so long but was always out of his reach.

They kissed over dinner plates and made love on the dinner table in Bond’s apartment. Bond was strong and gentle and everything Q needed Bond to be in that moment, and he didn’t even care that they both came only a dream second later because it far exceeded everything Q’s imagination could come up with awake.

There was no mention of technology in the dream. Phones were turned off. E-mails were left unanswered. All there was, was Bond, underneath him. Wrapped around him. Warm and alive; everything the robots from his nightmares weren’t.

When Q awoke the next morning, on his sofa, glasses on the tea table, it was as if he had awoken from a long nap in which the lines between reality and dreams were blurred. Reality that, if he could, he would make real. Only when he felt the warm blanket draped over his body and saw the still-broken pieces of the robot from the previous night on the floor did he realise that not a single part of his dream had been real. What _was_ real, was the carnage from last night, and the complete and utter fear that he felt.

His grief for his now unrecognisable sitting room was the thing that hit him hardest upon sitting up. It was a crime scene now. His fellow Q-Branchers would soon come and visit it and take apart every cabinet and sofa and piece of robot just so that they could confirm what Q already knew. Not a single part of his home would remain. Everything he’d worked so hard for, gone in the blink of an eye.

Then he saw Bond enter the sitting room with two cups of tea in his hands, tired fondness set upon his features, and his grief turned into embarrassment.

Q just remembered that he had definitely fallen asleep on Bond’s lap.

‘Slept well?’

‘I – yes,’ Q said uncertainly. He scratched the back of his head. He wasn’t sure whether he should bring it up, but something told him he had to. (What if he talked in his sleep? That would have been very embarrassing.)

Q said, ‘I must admit, 007, I do _vaguely_ remember falling asleep on your lap last night, and I wouldn’t normally bring something like this up, but I can only imagine how many times it’ll be mentioned at staff parties if I _did_ indeed . . .’ – He gestured vaguely at Bond’s body and didn’t finish his sentence – ‘A lot, presumably, given that my Christmas jumper from last year still made people snicker behind my back in March.’

Bond smirked. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you dozed off against my shoulder.’

‘Shit.’

‘And that you snore.’

‘ _Ah_.’

‘It was _very_ cute,’ Bond reassured him.

‘I see. Did — anything else happen?’

Bond made a confused face. ‘Like what?’

‘Never mind.’ Embarrassed, Q thought it best not to push the subject. He put on his glasses and gratefully accepted the cup of tea Bond had brought him. More rooibos. ‘Have you contacted MI6 yet?’

Bond nodded and took a seat next to Q. ‘None of our stuff was working so I had to borrow someone’s cell phone across the street. Some agents should be here to pick up the droid in half an hour.’

‘Not a Clementine phone, I hope?’

‘No.’

‘I’m surprised they couldn’t get here sooner. MI6, I mean.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you up.’

That comment warmed Q up more than the tea did. _He didn’t want to wake him up._

But Bond had to go and ruin it by adding, ‘You better go change, by the way. There’s blood all over you.’

Bond regretted it immediately.

‘What do you m— _oh_.’

Q remembered, suddenly. The late-night stroll in the Clementine offices. The security guard. Harry, dead. The blood on his hands. _Harry_.

This is how these things usually went. The random associations, the twists of mood. Bond had seen it all before.

How could Q have forgotten?

When Q closed his eyes, he was back in the Clementine offices with Harry again, watching, petrified, how his colleague fell backwards and hit the floor with a lifeless _thud._ He saw once more that _look_ in Harry’s eyes when the guard raised his arm and, and — but Q’s thoughts were too scattered and too far gone to make sense of it all, staggering over each wavering word as he told Bond exactly what had happened in the wrong order.

First, he hacked into his supervisor’s office and found — no, that wasn’t it.

Did he get on the bus first, then? Or —

He couldn’t for the life of him remember. He’d blocked all of it out. The only thing he remembered was how terrified he was feeling throughout it all, how utterly helpless and out of his depth, and so Bond gently shushed him as he hiccupped over one word after the next. Bond told Q that it didn’t matter, that he was safe and alive, and that he wouldn’t have to tell him anything until he felt ready.

Not that Bond actually thought Q ever would; they’d also never talked about the politician they both found dead several years ago, on one of the first missions they spent together. He always assumed that was Q’s first ever dead body. It must’ve been, judging by how distraught Q was after, and how quickly he fled the crime scene.

Bond should have told him everything was all right, talked to him about the note Q left. But he never did . . .

Q didn’t believe a single word until Bond folded his hand in his, and they spoke, quietly, about Pertwee and Baker until the shaking stopped and the bad memories faded. Pertwee was a Russian White, whatever that meant, and he was a bit bad of hearing. (Or perhaps he just displayed a lot of selective deafness.) The cat spent more time in the garden than lying on the sofa where Q wanted him, and – like Q –, he was a little stubborn. Baker the cat was old and lazy and shy, and Bond immediately liked the sound of him.

Bond’s hand felt rough and calloused and nothing like what Q needed in that moment. Q needed softness. A gentle touch of lips to his temples to get him through the morning. ( _Was_ it morning? He couldn’t recall.) And yet there was something very reassuring about the fact that these hands, which had seen so much damage, were still capable of turning Q’s thoughts into jelly. They made Q wish that he could sit here and hold Bond’s hand forever, until — until he no longer felt the need to be held. To be touched. He wanted to be touched by Bond, right here, but how could he enjoy it when his mind felt so scattered?

Q’s hands were the softest thing Bond had ever felt.

They talked about Q’s pets long after their tea had gone cold. By the time Bond had exhausted Q of the last interesting bit of information about Pertwee and Baker (like what they liked for dinner), the Quartermaster looked a bit happier, and less scared. But bloodied, and still shaky.

‘Would you like me to go upstairs and get you a new shirt?’ Bond offered. ‘Or a . . . sweater?’

Q shook his head, quickly and repeatedly. ‘I doubt I’m even capable of — of taking my shirt off,’ he said with a small wave at himself. He wasn’t playing: when he moved his hands to his tie, bloodied and damaged, all he ended up doing was tighten it because his hands were shaking too much. He shot Bond a look that said _Help me_ , a look that said he felt hurt and lost and damn it, M, so out of his depth — and so Bond slowly helped him undress after he’d fetched a clean sweater from his bedroom.

It was the first time Bond had seen Q half-naked, but now wasn’t the time to reflect on their wholly different bodies.

Bond unbuttoned Q’s blood-stained shirt and quickly helped his co-worker put on a sweater before they could both wonder why Bond took so much extra care not to let his fingers brush Q’s skin or why Q had suddenly gone so red. These were questions they didn’t consider, because they mustn’t: Q’s head was still half on the second floor of Clementine HQ, and Bond’s still here, wondering who he should punish for making Q feel so afraid. Bond let his hands drop to his sides when he’d done up the final button.

‘Good as new,’ Bond said, and he stared at the robot for fear of being caught looking at Q’s clad body for too long.

‘If only the same could be said about —‘

‘Your house? Yes.’

Q looked at his own hands in his lap. The blood on them was slowly fading. ‘Aren’t you scared of what people will say when they find out you helped me dress, 007?’ he said softly.

Bond chuckled. Now _this_ was the Q he loved. ‘Not at all. Are you?’ he said, in the same, soft voice.

‘No.’

In a flicker of a moment, Q might have seriously considered mentioning that there was also blood on his trousers and that he needed help getting them off, but the time for joking had gone. He realised that when he took a broom from the kitchen and cleaned and cleaned until his colleagues from Q-Branch arrived to assess what he and Bond already knew:

Everyone – and we really do mean _everyone_ – was in danger.


	5. What Would You Do With A Four Minute Warning?

That afternoon, Bond and Q almost confessed liking each other.

Like so many brief, beautiful moments in London, it happened on a wooden bench in Hyde Park, underneath the shade of a tree. The sun, which was slowly setting, was smiling down on them. Tourists were quiet as if allowing the spy and the Quartermaster to finally have their moment. Although it was 25 degrees Celsius, a pleasant breeze was tickling their skin that almost made them forget how hot they were feeling. The weather was perfect; almost too perfect for bad things to be happening, and yet suddenly everything changed with the flick of a switch.

But we digress. Let’s start at the beginning or, rather, let’s go back to where we left Bond and Q a couple of days ago, holding hands. Not quite hugging but wanting to. Q had gotten up from his red leather sofa to clean the living room, but even after twenty minutes of thorough sweeping and scrubbing most of the remnants of the recent Clementine attack were still there. The memories and fear remained.

Q couldn’t scrub and fix his house back to normal no matter how hard he tried, and so he didn’t complain when his co-workers finally came and picked him up for debriefing. Half an hour or so later, he was back at MI6 to tell a very curious M and some fellow Q-Branchers what had happened.

It was the same story he told Bond, albeit lengthier and, this time, less riddled with hiccups and stutters: he’d found papers that might be important. He’d seen a man be killed. The files on a Clementine computer proved that the electronics company was behind several deaths, most of them intentionally, presumably. A robot – his former smartphone – had gone and become a robot. James Bond had held his hand and helped him undress. (He didn’t tell them that.)

Bond was sitting next to Q throughout his report, nodding and humming whenever he or M said something true or agreeable. He was thankfully able to give a detailed account of what he’d seen at the CEOs penthouse and no, he hadn’t managed to run into her. He told them about Q phoning him at nine, and both his own smartphone and the lift at the penthouse suddenly not working. He added that he assumed Clementine had something to do with the latter, which led to one of the Q-Branchers discreetly but anxiously turning off her phone.

The agents left M’s office. The broken-up Clementine robot was taken to Q-Branch, and indeed, only half an hour later an unknown Q-Brancher told everyone that the Quartermaster’s claims had been correct and that they were being corroborated by the papers Q found yesterday: the robot _was_ Q’s old smartphone. Clementine had managed to turn a simple object into a weapon.

More worryingly, though, was the fact that Alt-Delete was indeed a virus that could be activated at will.

Every piece of Clementine equipment that Q-Branch had analysed – smartphones, tablets, M’s personal espresso machine – had the virus in it, and it was not hard to imagine that the previous one hundred deaths had just been simple dry runs. With two million Clementine products in the UK alone, why not activate the virus all at once and start a new reign of terror and technology?

But our Q tried not to let that thought get to him. Spurred on by a new, unfamiliar kind of motivation – the kind one generally feels after escaping death and not ever, _ever_ wanting to get through it again –, Q locked himself up in his lab and tried to come up with a solution for the problem. Even Bond, who would only let Q lose focus with his pretty blue eyes and — _God_ , those hands, was not allowed inside.

Problem is, Q had no idea where to start. At first, he wondered if he might be able to create machinery akin to the Clementine robots, but what good would that do? One MI6 robot against an army of, what, one million? 1.5? And even if MI6 did manage to manufacture combat-ready robots, would that not just create even bigger problems? Then came the idea of recalling every single device Clementine had ever sold, but then the people behind Alt-Delete would find out that MI6 were onto them. The one thing they didn’t need right now was publicity.

But what if he treated Alt-Delete like a disease? What if he tried to _force_ the virus out of a tablet or phone’s system and rebooted it? Create an anti-virus as it were. That should work, should it not?

Then again, what if it didn’t? What if he had this all wrong?

Q still thought about _that_ moment hourly, about Bond holding his hand. Every time he got stuck or saw the blood on his shirt again, Q imagined Bond’s touch, over and over. The roughness of Bond’s hands against his, warming him up and pushing him _that_ much over the edge. The way Bond squeezed his hand when he needed it most, imagined _every_ single second of the day because there wasn’t a single way Q was going to get through it otherwise.

Soon, he’d devised his seventh anti-virus, but still the Alt-Delete component remained in the core programming of his tablet, his new laptop. It seemed that there was nothing he could do to delete the virus from his devices. It was just stuck there, like a smear of permanent market on an expensive designer table.

His eighth attempt, still nothing. His ninth — that’s when Bond showed up.

Having just spotted something he’d previously missed, Q quickly jotted something down on a sticky note before shooting Bond a glare that only partly disguised how pleased he was about seeing him.

‘007, did you just _conveniently_ miss the sign on the door that says ‘Keep out’ or do you always blunder in without knocking?’ Q said, not meaning it.  

‘You put up a sign? I had no idea,’ Bond said sarcastically. ‘How are you?’

Q, who was busy typing something on his new laptop, ignored the question. (He was feeling bloody marvellous, thanks. No complaints here . . .) There was the electronic soundbite of a USB or hard drive being ejected, and Q pulled out a blue memory stick out of the side of his laptop. He looked at it questioningly, then slipped it into his pocket without Bond seeing.

‘007, how long would you say four minutes is?’ Q said randomly.

‘Sorry?’

‘Never mind,’ Q said, and he slipped a second USB stick into his pocket. ‘Was there anything you needed?’

‘Just checking up on you. How are you holding up?’

Q hadn’t thought about it because it wasn’t relevant. He hadn’t had a single personal thought since he got here and locked himself up to fix the Clementine problem. The only other thought he allowed himself to have was the fantasy of holding Bond’s hand whenever he no longer knew what to do. It was only now, with Bond standing right in front of him, that Q realised how he was truly feeling in the midst of it all.

He was feeling helpless, and terrified, because if he couldn’t fix this bloody problem then who could? It was as if having been on the verge of death gave him ownership of the solution. It was suddenly _his_ problem, not anyone else’s.

Clementine had invaded his home and made him scared to close his eyes in case he saw Harry being shot again, and he was going to do everything he could to wipe the company out of existence. And _then_ he was going to ask Bond out.

But how could he if he was never being honest?

Q swallowed. ‘Badly,’ he admitted, and that’s how, some time later, he and Bond were strolling through Hyde Park together like a should-be couple. Bond had a million other things that needed doing but none of them felt as important as trying to let that beautiful smile play on Q’s lips again. The CEO of Clementine, wherever she was, could wait.

Q didn’t realise that he had no idea what day it was until he saw the bright June sun cast tree-shaped shadows over the grass. If someone told him he’d been locked away in his lab for a week, he might actually believe it.

‘007, what day is it?’ Q asked Bond after they’d bought some food at a food stand. (Bond, a hot dog; Q, a takeaway pasta that looked better in the pictures than in real life.)

‘Thursday.’

‘And it’s . . . ?’

‘Five o’clock.’

‘But that would mean —’ Q broke off, and he counted. He’d been in his lab for more than a day.

‘I did try to call.’

‘No, it’s — it’s all right,’ Q said absently. He was like that, sometimes. When he was still young and in the early stages of learning how to hack, he often spent entire nights trying to figure out how passwords and programming worked. He’d slowly be working his way through a book on internet security, and the next second it’d be morning or afternoon. Eight hours, gone in the blink of an eye.

Those were always Q’s favourite nights. Less fun were the ones where every single second mattered.

Q moved his hand to his pocket and felt that the USB sticks were still there. ‘Have you had any word from —?’

Bond shook his head. ‘The murder hasn’t been reported,’ he said solemnly. ‘I’m sorry, Q.’

Q decided he no longer fancied his pasta, so he tossed it into a trashcan. ‘I don’t believe it . . .’

There was a long silence that neither of them knew how to fill. How could they both feel so sad when the weather was so beautiful?

Or _was_ it sadness? Q had been feeling blue for so long that he could no longer tell.  

‘I told Moneypenny and her _boyfriend_ to look after your cats, by the way,’ Bond mentioned by way of having something to say, ‘seeing that Q-Branch are still at your place and there’s a great big hole where your door should be.’

‘Good, good,’ Q said absently. ‘They’re not being too difficult, I hope?’

‘No, Moneypenny took it very well,’ Bond joked, which earned him a genuine laugh from Q. It’d been a while since he last heard that laugh. ‘They’re doing fine,’ Bond added, referring to the cats. ‘Baker’s a bit shy, but he’ll be all right.’

‘Thanks, 007.’

‘Pleasure.’

Q asked Bond whether he’d like to sit somewhere private so he could quietly finish his nasty-looking hot dog, but the park was very crowded so they ended up sitting very close to each other on a bench already claimed by a very, very large man. They were so close, in fact, that Bond’s knee kept bumping Q’s thigh whenever he moved. Q did not mind this at all. (Neither did Bond.)

‘Tell me about what you’ve been working on,’ Bond said once he’d finished his hot dog and threw away the wrapper. The large stranger had finally left for work, but even with over one-third of the bench now empty neither of them had the intention to move. The day was much more pleasant this way.

(Bond rather liked that Q was so close that he could practically _feel_ the heat radiateoff his skinny body.)

Q’s eyes flicked left and right. He was terrified of being overheard. ‘Before you entered my lab, I —’ he broke off when an inconspicuous-looking woman jogged straight past them. He waited until she was out of earshot, and went on, ‘I may have found something. At first I thought it was irrelevant, just a defect, like a — a broken pixel on a monitor, but it’s not. I think — (deep sigh) no, I _know_ that if Clementine activate the Alt-Delete virus on every single device at _once_ , it triggers a countdown. It’s a failsafe in case things go very badly wrong, essentially,’ he added when Bond nodded, understanding. ‘It’s very subtle, but it’s there, in the devices’ core programming. Every single one of them, in fact.

‘Stop the countdown on time, and the _entire_ system goes into lockdown. Deletes the Alt-Delete files, potentially even rendering the devices useless. I’ve,’ – he lowered his voice so that Bond had no choice but to lean forward – ‘I may have created an anti-virus, a program, as it were, that . . . _yes_ , triggers the countdown and consequently also triggers the Alt-Delete virus, but shuts it down at the same time. And thus deleting the virus off every single device. Theoretically.’

‘So you’re saying that if we want to delete the Alt-Delete virus —’

‘We first have to activate it, yes, but only for a second or so. If I’m correct,’ Q added uncertainly.

‘What if you’re not?’

A breeze made Q’s curls fall over his glasses. It made him look even prettier than he already was. ‘Not an option,’ Q said, and he wiped the hair off his forehead.

‘How did you find all this out?’

Q didn’t tell Bond that the only reason he didn’t go mad looking for a solution in his lab was because of _him_. Instead, Q said that he’d explain later (he wouldn’t), and there followed a pleasant silence in which they were for a moment left alone with their thoughts. Bond was thinking that the hot dog he’d eaten had a very nasty aftertaste and that he hoped he could one day invite Q to a proper place with proper food and maybe take him home before dessert, and Q was trying his hardest not to find his hand suddenly on Bond’s knee.

He could touch him _now_ if he wanted to. Everyone was so busy going about their own business – tourists, Londoners, families with overenthusiastic children, squirrels – that they probably wouldn’t even notice. They’d just be two men, touching. There wouldn’t be someone like Moneypenny to give him useless advice, bless her, and no M claiming that their relationship was doomed from the start due to the environments they worked in.

But Bond had already ruined the moment. ‘How long _is_ the countdown?’ he said suddenly.

‘That’s hardly relevant if we’re going to be stopping it immediately.’

‘How long?’

Q scratched the back of his head. ‘Four minutes, I’d say.’

‘Four minutes to save the world,’ Bond said thoughtfully. ‘It’s very poetic.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘There’s a lot you can do in four minutes,’ Bond said with an emphasis that went completely over Q’s head.

‘Such as?’

‘Enjoy an excellent bottle of wine,’ Bond offered. ‘Eat a good steak. Punch the colleague you’ve secretly always hated in the face. Have a really good —’ A playing child nearby screamed gleefully, so Q didn’t catch that last word.

After a brief silence, Bond added as his final suggestion: ‘Make _love_. Isn’t that what _you’d_ do,’ he asked a suddenly very red-faced Q, ‘if you had four minutes left?’

Q stammered, ‘I – I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘Then _do_.’

Q watched a young family of four pass them by. The eldest child, a teenage girl, was completely ignoring her parents by texting on her phone. Their son was busy playing a game on a handheld game console. Something about the scene should have rung alarm bells, but Q was too busy thinking about Bond’s question to notice in time.

What _would_ he do if he had four minutes left? He didn’t know. He genuinely didn’t. But if he thought hard enough . . .

‘Are you a lonely man, Bond?’ Q asked Bond apropos of nothing.

‘I am what I am,’ said Bond vaguely. ‘Why?’

‘You just don’t strike me as someone who would want to spend their final moments in someone else’s arms.’

‘I never said _that_.’

Q blinked. ‘But _I_ did,’ he said softly. _He would_.

Bond sat a little straighter. ‘Whose?’

Q shrugged as if he’d never thought about it. (He had, just now.) ‘Someone I care about. Someone — someone whose arms are familiar. Someone who’s kept me safe before. I think I’d like that someone to be the one I spend my final moments with. Not . . . to make love,’ – Q swallowed – ‘but to be held tight. To know that I’m safe, and happy.’

He had Bond’s full attention now.

Bond lowered his voice so that it matched Q’s whisper and said, ‘Found anyone who’s up for the job yet?’

Q’s eyes flickered to Bond’s lips. He couldn’t help himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think I have, 007.’

Q would have admitted that that person was Bond had there not been an explosion.


	6. I Think You, I Think Of Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out more about the other times Q tried asking Bond out.

There was panic, immediately.

Bond instantly got up from the bench – Q following closely behind, heart in his throat because of the words that had nearly left his mouth – and ran past curious onlookers with hands-on-their-mouths expressions to find the family of four that had just passed, alive. They were unharmed but terrified: having clearly just exploded, the daughter’s smartphone had changed into a molten, smoking piece of equipment on the grass. There was nothing left of it.

With the mother of the family too preoccupied promising her daughter that they’d get her a new phone, ‘promise’, Bond turned to the daughter’s distraught father. ‘What happened?’

‘I – Lucy’s phone suddenly had smoke coming out of it, so I – I t-tossed it on the ground before it could – _oh God —’_ the daughter’s emotional father broke off, and he hugged his family tight. The young son was still enthusiastically playing his video game as if nothing had happened, and one or two Londoners were in the middle of phoning the police, which could only mean —

Q felt the memory sticks in his pocket burn against his thighs, not because Clementine had gotten a hold of them but because he was realising something, something potentially life-changing and very important . . . And then as if someone had read his thoughts, almost every phone in the park started ringing. All at once.

Suddenly Q and Bond found themselves urging people not to pick up their phones in a cacophony of rings and dodgy song intros and yet more ringing, but they weren’t fast enough: the phones burnt people’s hands. Some melted or disappeared into little puffs of smoke. Then a dozen vehicles stopped working in the middle of traffic — buses, underground trains, taxi cabs —; even some of the screens on Piccadilly Circus ceased to work, and it soon became evident to our heroes that something very bad was happening indeed.

This was exactly the sort of thing Q had read about on his supervisor’s computer. These were the incidents that Clementine had done such a bloody good job at covering up — and now they were happening in the middle of London, to God knows how many people who didn’t carry a gun like Bond or didn’t realise that a robot could potentially be stopped by a cricket bat. Dozens of people, in danger.

And the memory stick in Q’s pocket was the only thing that might save them.

Imagine that, knowing you’ve invented something that might prevent something very bad from happening but having no idea if said invention actually works or not. The pressure it was putting on Q – or rather, the pressure he was putting on _himself_ – was tremendous.

The men had long forgotten about their intentions to tell each other the truth. To confess. Their hearts were no longer beating fast because of each other but because of the fear and adrenaline coursing through their veins; fear of losing to an unknown threat made up of wires and software. Traffic lights went crazy and laptops stopped working, and neither of them had any idea what was going on (well, Q did a little bit), but one thing they did know: it had to be stopped. _Today._

And so they ran and ran and ran with the sun setting behind their backs, having long forgotten that they were nervous and in love a minute ago.

They arrived at MI6 what felt like two hours later.

It was complete pandemonium. Few things were working. Even the phone lines were dead, and Q-Branchers left and right were trying their hardest to find something that worked, fast. But like their Quartermaster they were completely out of their depth, and even the cleverest of employees had no idea what to do now that the trustworthiness of technology had been rudely taken away from them. It vaguely reminded Q of those rare winter nights when suddenly there is a great, all-consuming blackout and you have no more television and no more functioning internet connection and you wonder how you ever got along without it. Q would usually keep himself entertained with a game of cards until an electrician showed up, but this was MI6. If these simple things didn’t work, nothing would.

‘Q!’ It was M. ‘Where the hell were you?’

‘He was with me,’ Bond quickly explained  before Q could open his mouth and embarrass himself, and M apparently accepted that answer because he proceeded to lead them both into an empty office where there were no electronic devices and no spies or Q-Branchers to overhear their chat.

‘Please tell me you can fix this, Q,’ M said, sternly. Clearly the fact that Q had almost been killed by a Clementine robot made him an expert on the things that were going on this evening. ‘I have about a dozen foreign intelligence agencies knocking on my door, terrified that whatever this is will spread. _Will_ it?’

Bond turned to Q too. ‘Is it Alt-Delete? Has it been activated?’ he asked, worriedly.

Q slowly shook his head. ‘If it had we’d all be dead already,’ he argued, which made M shuffle on his spot uncomfortably. ‘Is London the only city being targeted?’

‘Yes,’ said M.

‘Still?’

‘Obviously.’

‘All devices? No, don’t answer that; clearly _not_ ,’ Q mused, talking more to himself than to Bond or M, ‘The boy’s game device in the park was still functioning and some phones _here_ still work perfectly, which would suggest — they’re simply trying to scare us. Yes, of course. It’s not nation-wide yet.’

Bond: ‘But it will be?’

Q nodded.

‘Soon?’ asked Bond.

‘Presumably.’

‘That doesn’t explain _why_ ,’ M pointed out.

‘World domination,’ Bond said, rolling his eyes.

‘That is not a reason, 007.’

‘ _Fine_. So what do we do?’

Q showed them one of the memory sticks that he had inside his pocket. He didn’t tell them he had a spare one just in case someone was listening in: ‘We get the anti-virus I made to Clementine HQ and —’ He wanted to say _and wipe the Alt-Delete virus out of existence,_ but he couldn’t. The moment the words ‘Clementine HQ’ left his mouth, he felt a shiver run down his body that made the danger feel very close again.

Bond spotted it immediately. ‘You don’t have to come, Q. I can do this without you,’ he offered.

‘You have no idea how this anti-virus works. I – I suggest _I_ go in. Alone,’ Q said by way of making himself sound and look stronger than he was actually feeling. ‘I’ve actually _been_ to Clementine HQ, if you care to remember.’

‘So have I.’

‘You _haven’t_ , actually.’ Q added, exasperated, ‘Activating the virus is a complex process, 007. It — I _myself_ am not even sure whether it’s actually functioning. You might not be able to tell.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Bond said, suddenly clutching the hand that was holding the USB stick (thankfully a very timely explosion outside drowned out the sound of Q literally gasping), ‘but you can talk me through it. I know you can. I’m not having you risk your life again.’

Somewhere in the background M’s eyes had just rolled out of his skull.

‘There’s no _time_ ,’ said Q, his voice wavering not because of their predicament but because of Bond’s thumb rubbing the back of his hand. It was a simple gesture, nothing more than a gentle touch really, but to Q it meant everything because somehow Bond had managed to pick up on the one thing he needed: not for the city to go back to normal and Clementine’s reign of terror to end, but Bond, _here_.

Q swallowed the sentimental words that were forming in his head and instead said, ‘I’m coming with you, 007, whether you like it or not. I’m saving this city with you, and — ( _And afterwards I’m going to very skilfully kiss you_ , is what he’d have said had M not been in the room.)

With that, Q sauntered out of the office before Bond could get used to his touch.

*

Q’s dating history left much to be desired. He had been on some dates, of course, and some of them had even gone exceptionally well and led to breath-taking moments in bedrooms, but they had never led to second dates. Some of them never even led anywhere at all, and often he’d pretend to be phoned in the middle of dinner and leave. What’s worse, all his attempts to ask Bond out had thus far been quite unsuccessful too. The first attempt, as we all know, was a poorly delivered e-mail. The second, a near slip of the tongue. The fourth we have already witnessed, in Q’s lab on a quiet morning.

But there was a third moment of daring and spontaneity that we haven’t discussed yet. It was Q’s third attempt of asking Bond out, and the most traumatising one. And why?

Because it was classified information, and because it happened on the same day Q saw his first dead body.

It was supposed to be just an ordinary task on an ordinary night. Bond was to pose as a well-connected investor at a gathering held by an upcoming political party, and in the meantime he would try to gather as much intel about certain suspicious individuals as he went. (Every single member of the party, in fact.) It was all fairly straightforward, and so Q took a very big punt and asked Bond if he might be allowed to join him? After all, people generally got very drunk at these parties and consequently easy-to-hack-smartphones might suddenly find themselves in Q’s hands . . .

Bond didn’t think it was such a strange idea, so a cover story for Q was quickly fabricated and off they went to a place that looked a bit like a badly-lit Victorian gentlemen’s club — except women were of course perfectly allowed, and in fact encouraged because the leader of the political party was a well-respected woman herself. Here, they’d discuss their political ambitions and manifestos under the watchful eye of caviar and expensive champagne. Clearly the leader of the party thought that she might appear grander and more reliable than her peers if seen and perhaps photographed in such rich surroundings.

Like most people at the gathering, Q had a hidden agenda: he was going to buy Bond a drink and ask him out. Just like that. After all; in the presence of wine, chandeliers, people in power, and Victorian sofas, how could Bond say no?

(Also: the alcohol _might_ make Q feel a little less anxious than normal. He wasn’t supposed to drink on the job, usually.)

(He had really thought this one through.)

And all right, _yes_ , admittedly the idea _was_ perhaps a tad farfetched and to be fair Q could just ask Bond out in his own lab if he wanted to — but Q rather liked the idea of his ‘proposal’ taking place in such romantic surroundings. Besides, he’d be working with _Bond_ , for real this time. Even if he cocked up his private little mission, he’d have had the pleasure of sharing a mission with Bond! How perfect was that?

The party had momentarily left the dining tables and moved into an adjacent room for talking and drinking in, and Bond was already staring at the small bar up ahead. He had only a second ago found out that one of the male politicians in the room was most definitely hiding something from his peers, and Bond felt like treating himself for being so bloody good at his job.

_This is it_ , Q thought, who had spotted Bond eyeing up the bar, and he quickly offered Bond something to drink. Bond of course obliged, and he proceeded to discreetly interrogate a woman who looked a tad suspicious. When Q returned some moments later with two glasses of wine, the Quartermaster had inconspicuously slipped a folded piece of paper underneath Bond’s glass. It was simple and childish, but unmistakable. 

Bond slowly lifted his glass off the tray and spotted the message. Then the scream sounded, and all hell broke loose.

Q thought he could handle it when he and Bond ran up the stairs to check it out, but he couldn’t. The door opened, and his eyes met a truly horrendous sight.

A woman, murdered. Bond immediately ran back into the corridor to look for the killer, but Q just stood there, transfixed by the sight in front of him. All that blood. The way her body —

That was the worst part, her body. So lifeless. Limbs oddly positioned on the floor like she’d been thrown onto it like a ragdoll. That someone could just leave a person there, that was the worst of it all. Like humans were nothing more than disposable toys.

That did it, for him.

Q had already blocked out the mere _idea_ of asking Bond out by the time he exited the building and threw up in the street. Then he hailed a taxi and went home; a great mistake, perhaps, because what he did not know was that Bond had slipped his note into his pocket and read it. Bond knew, instantly, that the suggestion in the note was Q asking him out.

Q had asked him out, _finally_ , and Bond would have said yes if Q didn’t then proceed to spend the next four or five weeks completely lost in his own world. Bond didn’t think it right to say yes to such a beautiful question so soon after Q’s obvious trauma, and thus they both completely forgot about ever having come so close to a first date.

Until that night.

They went in alone. A couple of MI6 agents were on standby in case things went horribly wrong, but they were only going to insert a virus into a computer. How hard could it be? 

In the short period of time Q had worked at Clementine HQ, he’d come to know it as a crowded yet productive place. Like the products that the company itself had helped build, it was always in motion. There was never a dull moment. Even when Q was there at night, alone, he had the strange feeling that the electronic devices there were still running, still processing, and consequently so was the company itself, functioning throughout the night.

But when Bond and Q got there on an unusually chaotic evening of exploding phones and malfunctioning cars in the heart of London, the place was deserted. There were no security guards, no employees. Screens were turned off — for now. The doors that one normally needed a key card for were now unlocked. Oddly enough the lift was still working, and so Bond and Q were headed to the fourteenth floor within seconds.

The floor where Q had never been.

The plan was simple: they would pop the memory stick into the CEO’s main computer, an anti-virus would slowly enter Clementine’s systems, and the chaos in London would be stopped. All Clementine devices would cease to work, and a nation-wide panic would be prevented. Everyone would be safe.

Q would finally be able to return to his house without fearing another attack. They might even be able to spend an evening or morning together without being afraid.

That’s what they were both hoping for.

Bond and Q found the computer in a large, open office, and in went the USB stick. A reassuring _pa-pum_ sounded when a pop-up screen jumped into life. Q started typing and clicking away, deleting old files and uploading new ones.

Then a second screen popped up, and Q looked at Bond with new, sudden anxiety.

Q hadn’t had the time to test the anti-virus. It was as though Q’s attempts were a drawing, erased and then torn up by a hidden little component in the Clementine devices as if he’d never even made the drawing in the first place.

His ninth attempt could very well be just as unsuccessful. If it was, there’d be no more time to run back to the lab and try his hand at creating another anti-virus. He might get strangled by the angry cord of a tablet charger or, like, many, die at the hands of the nation-wide invasion the anti-virus might kick-start tonight.

If he did, Bond would never know what Q truly thought of him. He’d never be able to walk hand-in-hand with him, if that was something Bond liked. He’d never know if Bond was as good at kissing as Q always imagined he was. Bond looked like he might be a gentle kisser, someone who knew how to apply just the right amounts of pressure until you gave in and pushed back.

There had always been a chance that it would never happen, that their love story was destined to fail over and over, but for some reason their chances of getting together seemed even smaller than ever now. Q was only seconds away from telling Bond that he loved him on that bench, and now? Now he was here, staring at a computer with no idea whether he was going to get out of this building alive.

Worse still, how could Q have faith in his future with Bond if the one thing he always depended on – technology – was currently doing such a bad job at being what Q once admired it for? Technology was beautiful and concrete and the main reason he met Bond — what if it stopped being all of those things?

Then what would be left of _him_?

‘What are you waiting for, Q?’ Bond asked, his voice piercing through Q’s negative thoughts.

‘I haven’t tested this particular anti-virus,’ Q said slowly. ‘What if —’

But there was a screech outside, followed by a loud _thunk_ , and as if suddenly remembering why they were there, Q demonstratively pushed up his glasses and clicked the mouse, activating the anti-virus.

This was a bad decision.

An alarm started blaring. The sprinklers went off unprovoked. There was the sound of faraway doors being locked, one at a time. The shutters on the windows fell down, leaving Bond and Q in near-darkness but for the eerie lights of the office’s electrical appliances that were suddenly turned on: tablets, computers, radios, coffee machines. Even the high-tech water cooler in the glass-partitioned boardroom.

Everything was automated. Everything was, potentially, a weapon or made to look like one.

In the midst of the alarm, there sounded the voice of a woman, dominant yet robotised — announcing a countdown.

Bond and Q had four minutes left to live. 


	7. Then I Think Of Nothing; It’s The End, You See

With only four minutes left on the clock, Q had a choice: he could either die saving the world, never having kissed Bond — or kiss him regardless of the consequences. That, in short, was the dilemma that was running through Q’s mind over and over. Kiss Bond, don’t save the world. Save the world, don’t kiss Bond. Kiss Bond, don’t save the world. Save the world, don’t kiss Bond, etcetera.

It was odd how a crisis can suddenly highlight one’s priorities so efficiently.

_Project Alt-Delete has been initiated. Infiltration in T minus four minutes._

_I repeat, Project Alt-Delete has been initiated. Infiltration in T minus four minutes_ , it sounded over the speakers. _I repeat, Project Alt-Delete has been . . ._

But louder was Q’s high-pitched voice, swearing at the computer in front of him. He tried to pull out his USB stick, but like a key stuck in a lock, it wouldn’t budge. He pressed key after key, jabbed button after button. Nothing worked.

Bond watched how Q slammed his fists against the desk in frustration, sending droplets of water flying as he did so. His hair was now completely wet from the ongoing sprinkler rain, and most of it stuck to his forehead. Some of it even fell over his glasses, half blinding him.

Bond wished he could brush away the hair and tell Q everything was going to be all right, but there was no time.

_T minus three minutes and fifty-five seconds._

No time.

‘Talk to me, Q. What’s going on? Is it the anti-virus? What’s infiltration?’ Bond asked, but he had already guessed.

Infiltration would mean two million households being in danger; two million households, at the least, at the mercy of technology that should never have been made in the first place. His own watch contained Clementine tech. Q’s tablet, he knew, had partly been designed in their laboratories overseas. They’d _all_ be in danger, all over Britain. The chaos in London that he could hear even from up there was just the start of it. There would literally be no way of stopping it.

Q leaned his hands against the desk for support. He was breathing in and out through his mouth in short, quick exhales. The light of the screen highlighted the terrified look on his face. A drop of water clung to his chin.

‘I got it wrong,’ he said softly, his voice now only barely audible over the background cacophony of alarms and manufactured rain. ‘I got it so very, very wrong. I assumed that if I uploaded the anti-virus it would immediately trigger a – a Trojan Horse, a means to get in and reverse the program, stop it from – from being rolled out nationwide,’ – Q started when there was a loud _bang!_ out on the streets — there came the sound of hidden computers turning themselves on, like a million little engines revving – ‘but Clementine must’ve installed a back-up on a second computer in my absence, which means —’

Q suddenly had flashbacks of earpieces malfunctioning. Screens, acting strangely. MI6 smartphones weren’t working. Things that happened ages ago and seemed insignificant at the time but had everything to do with why they were here.

‘They were one step ahead, this entire time,’ Q said, realising. He looked sad, devastated, but Bond couldn’t tell why. ‘They were _there_ , in our phones — in our _homes_ , all this time.’

And they couldn’t stop it. Q knew that now.

_T minus three minutes and thirty seconds._

An old laptop lying neglected on a chair crackled and disappeared behind a sudden burst of smoke. The same happened to a tablet only seconds later.

‘James, there are a dozen Clementine droids headed your way,’ came Moneypenny’s anxious voice over Bond’s earpiece. He’d conveniently forgotten that she was listening in. ‘We are on route to your location, but it’s complete pandemonium and we may not be able to get there on time. You need to do something _now_.’

Bond heard it. The mayhem outside. People panicking because their smartphones felt hot in their pockets and busses stopped where they shouldn’t. Televisions switching over to different channels on their own accord like they were being controlled by someone else. The screens on Piccadilly Circus having ceased to work since that evening. The radio transmitting screeching sounds that you can’t turn off.

Bond didn’t know much about this anti-virus or how it all worked, but he did know that if they didn’t stop the countdown things were about to become a whole lot worse.

‘Then we’ll find it,’ said Bond calmly, to Q. He tried to ignore the cold shiver that ran up his body as more water clung to his coat. Most of it had crept into his thin t-shirt. (Poor Q was only wearing the sweater he had helped him put on. Normally such a sight would have excited him . . .)

‘Where is it?’ Bond said.

Moneypenny: ‘It’s on the thirteenth floor, east corner. Room 15.24.’

Q looked sadder than Bond had ever seen him when Q slowly reached into his pocket and retrieved a second USB. It looked identical to the one currently stuck in one of Clementine’s computers.

Another bang shook the building. A tablet screen flickered eerily in the distance.

Q knew something Bond didn’t.

_T minus three minutes and fifteen seconds._

‘I made a – a second virus in case of emergency, but one of us has to stay here to – to —’ Q broke off, and he pointlessly rubbed his already wet face when a tear rolled down his cheek. He opened his mouth to speak, but only a sob came out.

Bond had never seen Q so terrified. Even when his house had just been attacked by that fucking robot, there was still a part of Q that kept fighting. A part of Q wanted to get to the bottom of this odd case and _solve_ it, like he always did so successfully. But now it was as if Q had already given up, and God knows why.

Except — Bond _did_ know. He’d seen it coming since Q left that cute little message underneath his glass of wine. (Perhaps even long before that.) He therefore knew it was coming but he had never imagined it would take place now, when the world as they knew it might potentially be coming to an end, on the fourteenth floor of an office building that no longer let in the light —

And yet there came a light in the dark, Q-shaped and beautiful.

‘If you don’t finish the job I may never see you again,’ Q said with sudden, saddened determination, ‘and I may never know if you loved me.’ He was silent, then added, tremblingly, ‘You asked me what I would do if I had four minutes left to live, and this is my answer. _You_ are my answer. I desperately, hopelessly want to spend more time with you and when this is all over and we both live happily ever after I hope that you will too.’

Q wasn’t afraid of robots and exploding computers. He never had been.

‘But,’ Q added, his usual character shifting through his sadness as he wiped the tears off his cheeks, ‘ _please_ know that if you tell anyone what I just said I _will_ install very uncomfortable seats in the new DB9 I’ve been working on.’

_T minus two minutes and fifty-nine seconds._

He was just terrified of losing the one person he loved.

And Bond loved him back.

Forgetting for a moment the danger they were in, Bond took Q’s outstretched hand in his. It felt cold and wet and scared, so scared, and yet it fitted perfectly in his. He rubbed the back of Q’s hand with his thumb, and some of the colour returned to Q’s cheeks.

(Bond and Q really liked holding hands.)

He wanted to kiss him. He had ever since they met, really, under the watchful eye of _The Fighting Temeraire_ at the National Gallery such a long time ago. There was just something so tempting about Q; that youthful, faithful disposition that underneath it all hid a cheeky temperament that Bond wanted to get to know better.

He knew that if he and Q ever lived to get together, they’d be amazing not just sexually but in every way possible. They’d be unstoppable.

He’d kiss away the tears, and the water, and the fear, and he would do so until they were both safe, and warm.

_T minus two minutes and thirty-two seconds._

_Project Alt-Delete initiating._

And yet in the midst of all the danger, a cloud of mischief passed over Bond’s face. ‘Did you just say you’d . . . _do_ me if you had four minutes left to live?’

Unfortunately Moneypenny had already spoken over Q’s flustered answer.

‘Bond! The building is _not_ safe! You need to get the virus to the computer in room 15.24, thirteenth floor, _now_.’

‘Will you be all right?’ Bond asked Q. (Still holding his hand.)

_T minus two minutes and nineteen seconds._

Q nodded too quickly. Worry was edged into his features, but he tried not to let it be obvious in his voice. ‘Yes. I’m fine. Go, before we both do something we might regret.’

Moneypenny: ‘ _Now_ , Bond.’

‘I’ll come back,’ Bond promised Q, and left the office with the imprint of Q’s touch still on his skin. The USB stick was burning in his hand.

He didn’t look back. If he did — oh, if he did . . .

And so Bond ran, past flickering computers and objects that looked like maleficent droids in the dark. Through a vast curtain of sprinkler rain he skipped the last two steps on the way down the stairs, and Q would have checked where he was going on his Clementine tablet if not for the white noise that blocked every single app in sight.

There wasn’t much life left in their earpieces.

_T minus one minute and fifty seconds._

They had almost kissed.

_T minus one minute and forty-nine seconds._

One second more, and their mouths would finally have touched. Their bodies would have been closer than ever.

It was an incredibly strong incentive.

_T minus one minute and fifty seconds._

There was a familiar clang against the wall to Q’s left, and he knew his time was running out.

A download bar kept ticking in reverse on the screen in front of him. If it ever hit the edge, Project Alt-Delete would be irreversible and a lot of people would die. Including himself.

Another _clang_.

When Q looked at the wall, there was a large bump as if someone – _something_ – had tried punching it from the other side.

He realised then that there wasn’t a single thing that would save him if a droid ever reached him.

His taking out the droid at his home a couple of days ago was pure luck. If he hadn’t had an old cricket bat lying around, he’d now be dead or badly injured. There hadn’t been a single skill involved. More worryingly, he wasn’t a great shot like Bond and these things had probably been programmed to withstand all but the best-fired bullets anyway, so he couldn’t use a gun even if he wanted to. It’d be like firing at a wall of diamond.

_T minus one minute and forty-eight seconds._

Underneath the blaring alarm, Q could now distinctly heard something scrape the wall. He heard it move in large, heavy steps towards the door up ahead.

_T minus one minute and thirty seconds._

Bond reached a locked door. He made a movement to grab his gun, then remembered he’d left it with Q so that it might save his life.

He tried to kick the door open. It wouldn’t budge.

_T minus one minute and twenty-two seconds._

Terrified, Q grabbed the gun. His left hand was hovering over the keyboard, shaking, ready to press a button when asked.

He no longer knew if he could trust the technology to do its job.

_T minus one minute and thirteen seconds._

Grunting, Bond pushed all his body weight against the door and hestaggered into a large, lavishly furnished office that overlooked the city. The blinds not having been shut, he could see everything clearly: the lights of the homes and offices flashing on and off like out of control Christmas lights, hesitating in the dark. Plumes of smoke nearby. The red and blue lights of ambulances and police cars. There weren’t enough of them.

If they did not stop the countdown, there might not be a city left to look at.

_T minus one minute and two seconds._

Bond’s voice crackled into life in Q’s ear.

‘I know a place for our first date,’ Bond said unwaveringly as he made his way towards the only computer there. Its hard drive was running overtime, and the screen was soaking wet from the sprinklers.

He ignored the two lifeless droids that were stood behind the desk like two metal guard dogs, and sat down. He’d worry about them later, if he had to.

_T minus one minute._

Q: ‘Oh thank God, you’re still alive.’

‘Don’t sound so surprised, Q. I’ve had worse things threaten me.’

Bond looked for a place to stick his USB in. He couldn’t find one. He looked again. Still nothing.

On the surface, Bond looked like the calmest person to have ever been in a lethal countdown but deep down he was terrified. Every time he thought he had his emotions under control he heard the heavy footsteps of droids _thump, thump, thump_ on the floor above, and the fear for Q’s life as well as his own would come crashing back.

_T minus fifty seconds._

Bond found the USB port. He jabbed the USB stick into it, and a reassuring _click_ sounded before the same screens that Q had magicked into life earlier popped up. _He was in_.

‘You know that restaurant on the street where Moneypenny lives? Next to the newsagent’s?’ Bond said, to Q. ‘Let’s meet up there. You and I, tomorrow.’

‘At seven?’

‘At seven,’ Bond reiterated. He was trying his best not to let his voice match the anxious undertones in Q’s.

_T minus forty-two seconds._

Q audibly exhaled, his relief clear as day. (Bond was asking him out! _On a date_!) ‘Will you be wearing a suit, 007?’

‘If you like that sort of thing.’

‘Yes. Yes, I think I do.’

Despite the light conversational topic Q still sounded absolutely petrified, and he was quiet for far longer than Bond would have liked when another pop-up jumped into life on the screen before him. It was one Bond didn’t recognise from earlier.

_T minus thirty-three seconds._

‘Talk to me, Q,’ Bond said as he moved his mouse to a tempting-looking button in what looked like some sort of decryption program. It looked incredibly complicated. ‘What do I do once I’ve plugged in the USB?’

There was something near him. A presence. He could _feel_ it.

‘Press the — button, and — should—’

The spell of Project Alt-Delete had reached their earpieces now too. Not a single piece of technology or machinery was safe.

‘Q, I didn’t hear that. Which b—’

‘You need to p—’

There was a scream – Q’s – followed by a gunshot.

Bond didn’t stay to look at the faltering screen.


	8. It’s Always A Rush When You’re Around

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter ...

_T minus forty seconds._

Bond spotted a dying light in the reflection of the screen and he ducked just in time, fingers brushing the keyboard — the desk split in two next to him as the droid’s body hit it, but he was already two steps ahead —He hastened out of the office and ran back up the stairs. The sprinklers had run out of water and the computer screens had turned suddenly off, but he didn’t see; all he saw before him was Q, hurt, threatened or worse.

There were moments in time that Bond would never forget, moments that were perhaps forgotten in the minds of others but weren’t in his.

He ran and ran and ran, through unforeseen obstacles in the shape of stalling droids, shooting at him but missing by a hair.

Not a single robot was going to stop him now.

Window blinds blossomed open, and he caught himself in the reflection of an open window. He didn’t recognize the look on his face, so scared, so — _worried_.

There was a day, a long time ago, when he and Q worked on only their second or third assignment together. They still had no idea whether they could trust each other, even then. They’d more or less survived the assault on London and of course Q had successfully managed to lead Silva to Skyfall using only a computer and a geeky pair of specs, and yet – and _yet_. There was a certain inhibition, a certain lack of trust brought on by what they did not know, and it was only until Q spent some frightful moments in Bond’s ear that the trust was solidified.

Bond was left to his own devices in Monaco, and Q was the only person still present and awake to see his distress signal and lead him through the dark via an earpiece.

One of the droids got lucky and brazed Bond’s cotton-clad shoulder, but still on he went. He hardly felt the pain.

Pain was for later. Pain was not being able to see Q again, alive.

Bond wouldn’t have survived that mission in Monaco without him.

It was then that Bond’s willingness to see what kissing Q would be like changed into something else. He wanted to be with Q, not only on missions, but in life. Every day. And not because he felt like there was a favour he had to repay, but because he genuinely wanted to.

Bond wasn’t like that, usually. He had lovers for sport. He had lovers because they were intricate to the plots of his assignments, not because he wanted them to become a part of his own. Most of the time the men or women were expendable, and some of them didn’t even live to tell the tale. Those were the mistakes. The guilt pressing on his shoulders.

So, Bond didn’t really go in for proper relationships anymore. They weren’t necessary.

Then Q happened.

Another droid appeared in front of him, and he knocked it lifelessly onto the floor. Its head fell off and fell pathetically down the stairs like a bouncing ball made of steel and wires.

Regular people who worked at MI6 didn’t make jokes when seeing their field agents faced with certain death.

Q did that day, watching Bond via his laptop in Monaco.

It made Bond cling on to life more than he ever.

Lights flickered on as Bond ran and ran, as if the entire building was being recharged by his footsteps.

He would not allow Q to die on this mission. He’d be very angry with Q if he did.

_T minus t-ten s-s-ecooon-ds . . ._

They’d have dinner. Tomorrow. That’s what they’d agreed. Bond would wear a suit like he’d promised.

He’d never seen Q in a suit before; Q always wore those silly jumpers of his that drove Bond up the bloody wall because they covered far more skin than they had any right to. Sometimes he’d see the fabric of Q’s jumper move in time with his in- and exhales, and he’d imagine what Q would look like underneath it all.

Of course, Bond knew the answer to that question by now.

Q was beautiful.

_T minus n-niii-n-_

Bond stepped over the broken, fallen body of a droid and found Moneypenny in the corridor that led to the first office.

There were MI6 agents and Q-Branchers all over the place.

Q was nowhere to be seen.

Q was gone.

It was as if Bond had entered a world in which none of the past four minutes had happened. There was calm. The shutters were open, letting in flashing, blinding city lights. A faint breeze from the open windows had sent documents flying. A pile of blueprints lay neglected on the floor. There were no more alarms, nor a voice counting down in his head. Robots had ceased to work.

Only when he ran his fingers through his hair, did he remember that he was wet.

An agent came over to talk to him, but he dismissed him with a back of his hand and started, quite furiously, to where Moneypenny was stood. She was busy talking to an agent he didn’t recognise.

He needed to know.

‘Where’s Q?’ he demanded.

‘Thank you, Jones,’ Moneypenny calmly said to the agent, who then left. To Bond, ‘You’re bleeding.’

Bond glanced at his shoulder. ‘It’s just a scratch. Where’s Q? And where the hell _were_ you?’

‘Like I said, we were held up,’ Moneypenny explained calmly. ‘And Q’s all right,’ she added with a nod at Q’s shivering form in a boardroom behind a glass divider – he had a blanket draped over his body, and a cup of tea in his hands – ‘He just had a bit of a fright, that’s all. M’s talking to him now.’

Q spotted Bond in the corridor, and he shot him a meaningful smile before taking another sip of tea.

Q was safe. Safe, and alive.

Thank God.

Moneypenny was looking at Q quite fondly, and there was a mischievous look in her eyes when she turned to Bond again.

‘You heard all of that, didn’t you?’ said Bond. He watched an agent take apart a droid with a hammer. ‘What went on between me and Q.’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’ Moneypenny put her hands into the pockets of her dress. It was red, and knee-length.  ‘I think someone may have recorded it, actually.’

‘ _Great_ ,’ Bond said sarcastically.

‘Oh, don’t worry; we’ll only tease you about it for the next two months or so.’

‘So I take it the crisis has been averted?’ Bond said, keen to change the subject.

‘More or less. Every piece of Clementine equipment ceased to work once you had both activated the anti-virus. Good job with that, by the way. I thought you were too busy thinking about _Q_ to do it on time,’ she added tongue-in-cheek, at which Bond rolled his eyes.

Monepenny went on, ‘One of our droid friends did try to stop Q,’ – she nodded at the droid on the floor, which had by now been broken into tiny pieces – ‘but thankfully one of our agents managed to take it out on time. Q-Branch is going to analyse everything now.’

‘So now what?’

Bond felt a pang in his chest when he watched Q leave the boardroom with two agents at his side and the blanket still around his shoulders.

He wished he could thank him for tonight. Personally. 

‘I believe M has put 009 on the trail of the new CEO,’ said Moneypenny. ‘This isn’t the end of it yet, I’m afraid. We did manage to arrest several employees, but none of them seemed to know anything of value.’

Bond stared at his feet. ‘I mean with me and Q.’

Moneypenny smiled. ‘You don’t need my advice, James. Q thought he was going to lose you. Show him you’re not going anywhere.’

*

In the heat of the moment or in serious conversations pertaining to life and death, Bond sometimes said he was an assassin. That his job, mainly, was to kill people; bad, irredeemable people who no longer deserved second chances — but Q knew that to be wrong, completely and utterly. James Bond was a hero. He saved people’s lives. Q knew, because Bond had saved his.

On that eventful night at Clementine HQ, up on the fourteenth floor, one of the re-activated droids came crashing through the wall, sending paintings, staplers and stationery flying in its wake.

It was there to kill them.  

A bullet from Bond’s gun was enough to stop it, momentarily. Q had never fired a gun before, and it was probably his ignorance of the difficulty of the shot that made him pull it off. Had he known the chances of successfully firing a gun for the first time, he might not have been so lucky. He might have thought too hard about aim and probability, and failed.

Three seconds later back-up showed up: three long, essential seconds that Bond had given them.

A second less, and the droid _would_ have shot him. The crisis was over.

There were still loose threads, but every thread has its beginning and 009 soon found the new CEO of Clementine Tech on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Her reasons for wanting to start an electronic take-over were odd and almost dystopian: according to the records, she told 009 that she genuinely thought the world would be better off in the hands of technology. Humans, she argued, only cocked things up. Computers had emotions to get in the way of efficiency, and inefficacy only cost her and her companies money. That was her excuse.

But everyone knew she really just wanted to earn money off people’s fear. Indeed, how can consumers resist buying a new update for their malfunctioning tablets if it means no longer living in the fear of them exploding? Why battle droids with guns and computers when one of Clementine’s sister companies sells better, faster droids for less than a grand?

Why not try to make money off people’s modern dependence?

Q was still thinking about it all when he took a seat at a carefully laid table. It was the best seat there, next to a large window overlooking the prettiest and busiest part of the aligning street. He could look at people doing their last-minute grocery shopping if he wanted to, but people couldn’t look back at him. A couple walked out of a shop hand in hand, and Q wondered if that’s what he and Bond would be doing tonight.

It was hard to think that only a week ago the streets were in danger of being overturned by technology. How could this ever have happened?

Q stopped thinking when he saw Bond enter the restaurant.

_‘Stop fiddling with your tie,’ Moneypenny had said in Q’s bedroom that evening, before he left. She had offered to do some free of charge ‘cat sitting’ in case Q ended up staying away from home for a particularly long time, but Q declined. The last time someone tried cat sitting at his apartment, the poor guy ended up in hospital with a hundred scratches on his arms._

_She went on, ‘You look fine,’ and playfully slapped Q’s hand when he kept touching his tie because he needed it to look impeccable._

_Q’s hands were shaking in sheer nervousness, so he had to ask Moneypenny to do his tie for him. He didn’t bother asking her who had taught her to do it._

_‘What if he doesn’t like me? What if he wears a £3,000 suit and I show up wearing —_ this _?’ Q waved an unsatisfactory hand at himself in the mirror. The only thing that wasn’t new about his attire were his glasses, and yet his anxiousness made him feel like a boy wearing his father’s clothes. ‘I look like a bloody mess. What if he decides that it’s not working out halfway through supper? What if I get c_ _rème brûlée on my jacket, have you ever thought about that?’_

_‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘And he’s not like that, you know. Leaving, I mean.’_

_‘I bloody well hope so. I can’t imagine how disappointed I’ll be if we don’t even make it to the fish course.’_

_Moneypenny made an impressed face in the mirror. ‘So he’s taking you to a proper restaurant then?’_

_‘I . . . yes.’ Q inspected his arse in the mirror. It looked all right. ‘I’d worry if my date took me to a fast-food chain, wouldn’t you?’_

_‘At least you’d be home in time for_ desert.’

Wearing a tailored tuxedo that looked snug in all the right places, Bond looked amazing. It was almost as sexy as the tight shirts that he always wore in exercise. He smiled at Q when he spotted him sitting near the window, and Q instantly felt warmer and happier than he had all month. Finally, things were starting to look up.

As Bond approached him in that splendid tuxedo of his, it suddenly occurred to Q that he had not thought through how they should greet each other. This was technically a date, so shaking hands would be pointlessly formal. Then again, embracing him in a tight man-hug might make Q appear as being too _keen_.

And he _was_ keen, that wasn’t the point, but — did Bond do hugs? Was he a huggable person?

‘Hello, Q.’

‘Hel— _oh_.’

Q had finally made up his mind when Bond kissed him on the cheek. Bond’s skin felt smooth and soft against his, and his lips — oh _dear_. Q had spent many a lonely night thinking about those lips.

Seeing Q’s hand awkwardly hover in mid-air for the handshake he was clearly anticipating, Bond gave it a squeeze and motioned Q to sit down.  

When Q did, a very obvious blush had passed over his cheeks.

So, kissing. That was a thing that was definitely happening tonight.

Awkwardly, they both started speaking at the same time: ‘Have you ordered yet?’ ‘I was meaning to thank you for—’

Bond smiled self-consciously. ‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘It’s not very important. It can wait.’

‘Go on, Q.’

Q inhaled sharply. He’d rehearsed these lines. ‘I just wanted to say thank you — for saving my life the other day. I don’t think I’d be sitting here if—’ He sighed; he clearly hadn’t rehearsed his thank-you enough — ‘Just, thank you. For being there, and allowing me to share this evening with you.’

‘I gave you a gun and left. That’s hardly worth a thank-you,’ Bond said. A waiter came over to take their order, and Bond asked for a bottle of expensive red wine. They’d decide on their food later.

Bond went on, ‘How are you, by the way?’

‘Busy, mostly,’ Q said, happy to talk about something he knew so that he might forget his nerves. ‘There are some issues that I need to sort out with M following the — incident. I believe some of my colleagues at Q-Branch are currently working out a product recall w—’

‘I know that,’ Bond interrupted, kindly. ‘I meant mentally.’

Q was silent, then, ‘Like I’m on my very first date and I’m about to be conveniently sick in that plant pot over there.’

‘This _isn’t_ your first date, is it?’

‘—No.’ Q stared at the menu before him, then said, ‘I take it this isn’t _your_ first date?’

‘The first one with someone I care about.’

Q flushed a deeper shade of red, so he conveniently hid his face behind the menu so Bond wouldn’t see.

The restaurant they were in was one reserved for people with exquisite taste and, ultimately, very large salaries. It was known for using cooking techniques that combined man’s knowledge of science and cuisine, and its poached salmon was a common favourite with the restaurant’s faithful clients. It wasn’t the cute vegan restaurant in Soho that Q had in his mind when planning to ask Bond out at the start of their story, but it was good enough.

M was paying. (He didn’t know this yet.)

Starters were ordered and the menu forcefully taken from Q’s hands by the waiter, so Q had no choice but to look at Bond. When he finally gained the courage to properly look him in the eye after some quick glances, a look had passed over the spy’s face that Q had never seen before. It gave Q the strange, exciting premonition that he might not be heading home on his own tonight.

‘Moneypenny said you’d be nervous,’ Bond pointed out when their drinks finally arrived.

‘Unlike you, Bond, I don’t get asked out a lot.’

Bond, dissatisfied with the thin layer of wine the waiter had poured into their glasses, took the bottle and poured in a bit more himself.

‘Perhaps everyone thinks you’re out of their league. You’re certainly out of mine,’ Bond said smoothly before taking a quick sip of wine.

‘I’m out of _your_ league? Have you ever looked into a mirror, 007? With that — amazing, _wonderful_ body?’ Q said, and having realised what he just said, he downed the contents of his glass in one go. He put down his glass with a loud _thud_ and helped himself to more wine.

Bond smirked. ‘ _Hm_. So you’ve been looking.’

‘It’s hard not to. I _have_ spent a lot of time looking at your backside on my laptop. During surveillance, I mean,’ he added quickly.

Bond was silent, then, ‘Just for the record, Q,’ he said, purposefully lowering his voice to a whisper so that Q had no choice but to lean forward, ‘I love _your_ body. And I’ll treasure every inch of it if you let me.’

That comment did things to Q that would likely land them both a kicking-out if a waiter or chef ever noticed it.

‘And here I was thinking you loved me for my intellect,’ Q said, challengingly, before drinking some more.

‘ _Hm._ ’

The delicious starters then arrived, which gave Bond and Q a short moment to reflect on their own thoughts and insecurities while they quietly enjoyed what they had ordered. Q, predictably, thought about how glad he was to finally have the Clementine case behind him. The last few days and weeks had been absolutely exhausting for him both on a personal and professional level, and he nearly gave up on it all. To think that he was now here, enjoying such excellent almond crusted raviolis stuffed with spinach – with Bond! –, was an odd juxtaposition of feelings. One moment he was battling robots, and the next he was here, loving life and all that was yet to come.

Bond was mostly considering how he was going to get out of his incredibly snug suit later that evening.

‘When did you, you know, _know_?’ a very curious Q asked Bond after he had finished his starter. It was a self-indulgent question, he knew, but one he thought he ought to have an answer to by now. (Especially because he couldn’t remember when _he_ started fancying _Bond_. It sort of just crept up on him. In a good way.)

‘Know what?’

Q coloured. ‘That you fancied me, obviously,’ he said, uttering the words as though he still wasn’t sure whether Bond liked him at all. He knew that Bond had admitted liking him by asking him out and holding his hand and generally just being nicer to Q than anyone else in the world ever, but it was still an odd thought. James Bond, liking him.

 _James Bond_ , who could have any man or woman he desired, liked him. How bizarre.

‘You really want to know that?’

Bond’s foot then very deliberately touched Q’s ankle, so Q jumped a little when he said, ‘I do.’

‘It was Monaco,’ Bond said softly. He paused in remembrance, and added, ‘You kept me alive that day. Do you remember?’

Q nodded. Of course he did. He’d never felt such immense fear for someone else’s life.

‘I told you about the world’s first computer while you —’ Q broke off, and he stared at his own hands holding the wine glass. If he let go, Bond would see how nervous he was still, and how utterly anxious the thought of losing Bond still made him feel.

They never talked about Monaco. It was a mission gone wrong, and if Q had not been there to answer Bond’s distress call they would not be sitting here.

Every time Q heard Bond exhale on that odd mission, it could have been the last time. Every word or pause or sniff was potentially the last thing he’d ever hear the spy do.

The thought was tremendously frightening, and so Q stayed up all night to try to keep Bond talking. To keep him alive. To reassure Bond like only a person completely in love with someone could do, and it _helped_. Perhaps it was Q’s voice or his facts or just his complete ignorance as to how truly in danger Bond was — but something about it made Bond cling to life more than anything.

That’s when he knew.

‘I was already preparing for everything to end, and then there was you, guiding me,’ Bond said. ‘You made a _very_ crude joke about one of our colleagues, if I remember correctly.’

Q chuckled. ‘I can’t believe you remember that.’

‘I remember everything you told me that night,’ Bond admitted, and he did so with such a piercing stare that Q had to down more wine. ‘Are you going to _keep_ drinking like that?’

‘Yes,’ Q squeaked when he felt Bond’s foot move slowly up his own leg. ‘Why?’

Bond swallowed, and waited until the waiter had given them their cheque to tell Q that he’d rather kiss him while he was still sober.

Things moved very quickly after that, and an increasingly nervous but horny Q soon followed Bond into a taxi cab. They arrived at Q’s refurbished house within fifteen minutes, enough time for Q to realise two things: one, he’d waited long enough; two, he was glad he had taken very great care of choosing a new sofa because they probably weren’t going to make it past the living room tonight.

And so when Q quietly led Bond into his home and closed the –fixed  door behind him, there were only a few things he wanted to say.

‘007, purely for the sake of efficiency,’ he said, less nervous than before, ‘can we please skip the part where we talk about our feelings and move things along?’

Bond smirked. ‘Are you saying you’re a _desperate_ for me, Q?’

‘Yes, 007, very much,’ Q said, and he inhaled sharply when finally – _finally –_ Bond’s lips landed on his.

It was everything Q had imagined, and more. Bond’s kisses were perfect and hot and _oh so_ arousing, but it was never enough so soon Q was pulling Bond closer by his tie, hoping for a moment that the tie would later find itself around Bond’s wrists. (It would, indeed.)

They quickly undressed, using both their eyes and their hands to discover and cherish each other’s bodies: Bond’s was strong, scarred and so, so _hard_ , and Q’s _—_ flat and soft, and flushed red in all the right places.

They undressed until there was no more piece of clothing left to remove.

Then came the more daring touches. Q’s hand, sliding down the small of Bond’s back; wet fingers probing his entrance and slipping slowly inside; their cocks, rubbing and touching as they kissed, creating the perfect friction between their two bodies.

A single moan that escaped Bond’s mouth when a sensitive spot was massaged turned into another, and another, and soon they found themselves not in the hall but on Q’s new sofa, touching. Kissing, desperately, with Bond arching his back every time Q’s lips found themselves on his ear or the scar on his shoulder.

That was just the start of it.

Perhaps it was the alcohol or just the sheer thrill of having Bond underneath him, but Q quickly took control by pinning Bond’s arms above his head.

Bond didn’t think he’d ever get to see this side of Q.It was sexual and dominant, and it suited Q to a tee.

Everyone he knew assumed Q was an introverted guy, a bit of an inexperienced geek perhaps, but Bond knew better now because he was the one lucky enough to feel Q’s wet cock rub up against his own. Bond bloody loved it, and he loved it even more when Q slid inside of him a minute later, so warm and _big_ —

He had barely gotten used to the idea of Q filling him up when Q started to move harder, quicker, making the sofa creak under their movements. Hands, again, were everywhere: on Q’s flat stomach; in his hair; fingers trailing the spot where a robot had shot Bond . . . These places were all brand new, highlighted by the sweat glistening on their bodies; spots they’d be treasuring over and over.

They said nothing as they rocked the sofa, Bond’s legs wrapped tightly around Q’s small frame.

It was a perfect night, and so they were too busy reaching their orgasms together to notice that the eyes of Q’s cats had suddenly lit up as if they were two very fluffy robots.

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and leaving comments! ♥


End file.
